Why the College Board Demoted the Founders
As Anderson points out, while Jennings' crude attacks impeded recognition of his work, Jennings did inspire a new generation of historians to offer essentially the same arguments in more tactful language. No one has worked harder to make Jennings' radical revisionism respectable than Anderson himself. Anderson's book, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500—2000 (co-authored with Andrew Cayton), is essentially an attempt to extend Jennings intellectual framework to American history as a whole.
Anderson's target in The Dominion of War is the American conviction that liberty and equality are the "core values of the Republic." Believing this, says Anderson, Americans find it difficult to see their actions as imperialistic, as motivated by anything other than a legitimate defense of liberty.
In seeking to disabuse Americans of their overly democratic self-image, Anderson expresses frustration with "a grand narrative so deeply embedded in American culture that [it] persists despite the long-running efforts of professional historians to revise [it]." This delusive conviction that America's democratic principles are at the root of our history and foreign policy must be replaced, says Anderson, by a frank acknowledgment of our desire for dominion over others. Anderson then adds:
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To found a narrative of American development on the concept of dominion is to forgo the exceptionalist traditions of American culture—those durable notions that the United States is essentially not like other nations but rather an example for them to emulate, a "shining city on a hill"—in favor of a perspective more like the one from which historians routinely survey long periods of European, African, or Asian history.
American exceptionalism is out and America as a self-deluded imperialist power is in. Academics finally get to force their cynical revisionism on a public that stubbornly clings to the Founding. These are the ideological and political underpinnings of the new APUSH Framework.
True, Anderson occasionally concedes that American history is actually a complex mixture of liberty and imperialism. In practice, however, he either ignores the democratic side of this equation or dismisses it as an illusion. In its review of The Dominion of War, The Wall Street Journal points out that Anderson and Cayton "don't even mention the Declaration of Independence in their discussion of the American founding."
A convincing revision of American history along the lines of Jennings and Anderson would have to integrate a detailed interpretation of our political and Constitutional history with an account of our alleged imperialism. It would need to expose the supposed hollowness of our democratic pretensions in considerable detail. Yet Jennings and Anderson make only the most limited gestures in this direction. They offer a questionable critique, rather than the new grand narrative they advertise.
Jennings and Anderson are able to place Native American influence and white imperialism at the center of American history only by treating the acquisition of territory as what matters most. This assumes what is to be proven. The structure, function, and underlying rationale of our political system is ignored, rather than debunked. That is why Jennings and Anderson fail. In any case, treating their interpretations of what is "central" to American history as an objectively established "finding" is ludicrous.
Consider Anderson's retelling of the Alamo story from the perspective of Santa Anna and the Mexicans. His argument depends on the reader accepting Mexican accusations of American imperialism and hypocrisy. Yet nearly everything in Anderson's account tends to strengthen the case for the advocates of Texas independence. We already know that Santa Anna sparked a revolt when he nullified the Mexican Constitution and declared himself dictator. Anderson adds to this an account of the deeper habits of thought behind Santa Anna's actions. That cultural and biographical account may help explain Santa Anna's dictatorship, yet it hardly excuses it. I put down the chapter thinking that the heroes of the Alamo had gauged Santa Anna's intentions with remarkable accuracy. Anderson never actually offers an argument to debunk the Texan defense of liberty. He seems to think that merely presenting the Mexican point of view in sympathetic terms is enough to settle the dispute. It is not.
If I were a citizen of Texas, I'd be as proud as ever of the heroes of the Alamo after reading Anderson's book. But I'd be appalled that someone like Anderson had managed to gain control of the history curriculum in my state.
In the AP Curriculum Module on Native Americans, Geri Hastings, one of the most influential authors of the redesigned APUSH Framework, follows up Anderson's account with a lesson plan. She asks students to imagine that they've been hired by "an eighteenth-century human rights organization." Their job is to decide whether the British, French, or Spanish colonizers had treated the Indians more harshly, "and to indict the harshest colonizer for 'crimes against humanity.'"
Defenders of the redesigned APUSH Framework deny a political agenda. All we're doing, they say, is teaching students how to "think like historians," how to deploy critical thinking skills and analyze primary sources with the cool detachment of an objective and mature professional academic. Sadly, teaching students how to bring our forebears up on charges of war crimes is what "thinking like a historian" has been reduced to in this age of the leftist Academy. It's got little to do with detachment.
My earlier account of the influence of "transnationalism" on the authors of the new APUSH Framework is entirely compatible with the perspectives of Anderson and Hastings. Transnationalists abhor American exceptionalism, have a leftist foreign-policy agenda, a penchant for presenting history through the eyes of America's enemies, and a passion for bringing the United States to heel through the influence of foreign law and international "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs). Hastings' classroom exercise is an embarrassingly anachronistic attempt to train students in precisely this sort of "transnational progressivism." This is historical "presentism" in extreme form, with moral conclusions built in from the start. Why not have students probe and debate the complex cycles of cruelty and misunderstanding between settlers and Indians instead?
Hastings' larger strategy for teaching Native American history is unabashedly designed to elicit partisanship, rather than objective "thinking skills." "Students might even cheer," she says, "as the American Indian Movement of the 1970s gained strength and undertook numerous legal battles to recover Indian lands." So students are literally supposed to become cheerleaders for the American Indian Movement (AIM), a decidedly radical group whose actions remain controversial to this day. Should students then follow the leftist fashion and support a pardon for Leonard Peltier, an AIM gunman from the mid-1970s serving a life sentence for murder?
The new APUSH Framework shorts political and economic history in the post WWII era, as well as at the Founding, and is top-heavy instead with bows to various left-leaning movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the movement of American Indians. If you suspected this had more to do with political cheerleading than a balanced presentation of history, Hastings' lesson plan confirms it.
We must conclude that what the College Board presents as objectively based historical revisions and politically neutral pedagogical techniques are nothing of the sort. Critical thinking skills are deployed only against the traditional American narrative. Leftist pressure groups elicit cheerleading. America's Founding is demoted, not because revisionists have proven it marginal, but because they dread and abhor its political legacy. In sum, the College Board's pretensions to political neutrality are a sham.
What is American history about? I'm sticking with Lincoln.
Many will disagree, yet that is the point. The five-page outline that used to guide APUSH left plenty of room for the teaching of history from a variety of viewpoints. The very idea of the College Board effectively nationalizing the teaching of American history via the creation of a lengthy and inevitably controversial Framework is mistaken. The College Board needs to return to a brief conceptual outline that leaves states, school districts, and parents free to make their own decisions. That is the real American way, as any good student of the Founding could tell you.
