Narrating the Postwar World: AP U.S. History and the New Right

Historical survey courses must aim for a sweet spot between two extremes. On the one hand, they need to cover enough territory to map for students a reasonable junk of world history. You cannot make the classic grad student mistake of offering an undergraduate course about your dissertation topic; "Late Progressivism: America from 1910-1914" is unlikely to get many signups and even less likely to benefit many students. But a survey course can miss in the other direction as well, proposing to cover so much territory that only the thinnest narration is possible. This is a problem for world history courses everywhere, and reaches its reductio ad absurdum with the Bill Gates-endorsed "Big History Movement," which purports to cover everything from the formation of the Earth to the present in one curriculum, largely reducing history to geology in the process.

Advanced Placement U.S. History often threads this needle quite nicely, but when it errs, it errs in the direction of covering too much. The course provides high school students with a much needed framework in which to place later study of American history and it also weaves in "Document-Based Questions" that ask students to form interpretations of historical issues based on primary sources. The exam itself, in addition to a multiple-choice portion, includes a variety of essay questions asking students to demonstrate several different forms of synthesis and analysis.

All of this is to the good. However, in aiming for comprehensive coverage, AP US History also spreads itself thin, a thinness that can result in a certain kind of narrowness as well. The current curriculum asks teachers and students to sift through American history from 1491 to present in a single year; a sample pacing guide from College Board suggests devoting a scant five hours of instructional time to the period between 1491 (and presumably here "1491" is functioning as a synecdoche for "all Native American history prior to European contact") and 1607. The result of this frantic pace can be kind of capsule history of American periods. Any competent APUSH student can give you a 3-sentence Reader's Digest version of the Progressive Era: abuse of workers; industrial reforms; Teddy Roosevelt. Great teachers can find room for interpretive disputes and historical revision. But in a course that needs to clip along at AP's prescribed pace, there is only so much that can fit. Situating the Progressive Era in its postcolonial (or, if you prefer, emerging American colonial) context is not much on the agenda; queer history is even less likely to get a hearing. Spending time debating the merits of these different historiographical emphases is all but impossible.

Because of their reach into thousands of American and international high schools, these brief summaries will frame American history for tens of thousands of students. And from that fact derives the importance of last spring's AP US History exam which, in the 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act, devoted its Document Based Question not to the Civil Rights Movement, but to "a new conservatism" that "rose to prominence in the United States between 1960 and 1989."

This is a signal shift in how we narrate the postwar world for high school students, a shift away from the postwar era as the triumph of progressive causes and toward it as the triumph of conservative reaction.

At least as an intellectual exercise, this reframing is in some ways long overdue. As Lisa McGirr argues in her brilliant rethinking of the sixties, Suburban Warriors, the conservative movement has been largely ignored in histories of the sixties because it has been “overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture.  Images of Martin Luther King proclaiming ‘Let freedom ring’ on the Washington Mall, students burning draft cards at federal induction centers, and flower children gathering in Haight-Ashbury for the ‘summer of love’” dominate our collective memory of the decade (McGirr 6). McGirr refocuses us on the quieter moments in coffee klatches and PTA meetings that, over the sixteen years from Goldwater's disastrous presidential campaign to Reagan's election, would remake America at the deepest political levels. A number of other academic historians, joined notably by Rick Perlstein's popular histories of the New Right, have made similar arguments over the last decade or so. 

But if this shift in narrating postwar America is intellectually interesting, it is also tempting to see it as politically troubling. If we want the high school students of America to remember three sentences of the postwar world, surely we would rather they remember Martin Luther King, Jr. at the pulpit or Abby Hoffman defiant in a Chicago courtroom than William F. Buckley pontificating in The National Review or George Wallace on the campaign trail. With limited instructional time, the appearance of the New Right in the AP US History curriculum cannot help but crowd out the more traditional heroes of the period.

The solution to this problem is obvious if difficult: moving away from the survey model and toward narrower content coverage. A course that took on less would have time to do more with it. In this specific case, that "more" could involve some real historiographical work for students: which reading of the postwar world, the rise of the New Left or the rise of the New Right, is more valid? What criteria would we use to choose? Is there a way to synthesize the two readings into something that grasps more of the contradictions of the period? Who gains and who loses when one of these interpretations dominates? Those are real and difficult questions. Getting at them would be great. But it would demand jettisoning a lot else--losing, say, 1491-1607 in favour of a deeper look at 1960-1989.