Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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One of the most striking things about Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent address to the U.S. Congress was the way the president of Ukraine invoked the history of the United States. In framing his country’s fight for freedom as a universal struggle, Zelenskyy cited the Battle of the Bulge, the Revolutionary War victory at Saratoga, and Franklin Roosevelt’s appeal to the “righteous might” of Americans in the Second World War.
“American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom,” Zelenskyy said. “The freedom of people who stand for their values.”
Every country needs a sense of history, a shared story that doesn’t just recount the facts of the past but offers a guidepost for the present. The United States needs that narrative more than most. We’re a nation of immigrants, a country without common bonds of religion, ethnicity or ancestral homeland to draw us together. If we’re going to keep our grand experiment in self-government, we need a national story that is both honest and inspiring.
That’s why I was so heartened to see the findings from a recent survey by More in Common, a national nonprofit dedicated to lowering the temperature of American public life by demonstrating how much unites us. “We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures,” the survey found. “Americans across political parties, ages, genders, races and income levels share common ground about teaching about prior injustices, as well as about teaching the contributions of everyone from George Washington to Rosa Parks.”
At a time of endless coverage about school board battles, book-banning campaigns, and fights about whether and how to teach the darker parts of U.S. history, it turns out most people have a sensible, well-balanced understanding of how to tell our story.
What we don’t have is enough faith in our fellow citizens. Again and again, More in Common documented a huge gap between the reality of Americans’ very reasonable beliefs against the perception of widespread extremism. Ninety-two percent of Democrats agreed that “all students should learn about how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality,” but Republicans thought only 45% of Democrats would agree. Ninety-three percent of Republicans agreed that “Americans have a responsibility to learn from our past and fix our mistakes,” but Democrats thought only 35% of Republicans would agree.
“Democrats and Republicans alike think the overwhelming majority of their political opponents hold sharply divergent views over teaching history, when in fact, most of the time everyone is standing on common ground,” the researchers wrote. “Most Americans have imaginary enemies in their minds and a misleading picture of the country as being irreconcilably divided over how to teach our history.”
There are genuine differences, of course. Devoted activists on the progressive left and far right disagree over how to talk about race, the role of patriotism in civic education, and where to draw the line in emphasizing past harms. But those extremist views mask a remarkable amount of common sense among normal Americans about how to frame the country’s flawed-but-inspiring past.
“History is always complicated, and it rarely gives us exactly what we want,” explained my dear friend Lloyd Kramer, a distinguished historian at the University of North Carolina who has thought deeply about how national stories shape today’s politics.
Kramer was speaking at a ceremony last fall to accept the university’s Thomas Jefferson Award, and he used the occasion to deliver a brilliant call for understanding the good and bad in our collective past. “This is one of the outcomes of a good education: the ability to live with and explore the ambiguities and contradictions that exist in all human beings,” he said.
That’s the kind of education most of us want for our children. It’s the kind of nuanced history that most teachers want to share. It’s the kind of story that can inspire people half a world away to fight for their freedom, and remind us to cherish ours.
Eric Johnson is a contributing columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. He works for the College Board and the University of North Carolina.
