The American Family and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Historians, Class, and the Problem of Curricular Diversity

Though the development of “public history” as a professional practice and its arrival as an academic field date back only to the mid-1970s, an emphasis on the role of historians as public actors with unique societal responsibilities has punctuated the self-reflective literature issuing forth from the profession throughout much of the 20th Century. In his 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA), Conyers Read advised that “history has to justify itself in social terms.” In a postwar world whose grand drama shifted from the defeat of fascism to the crusade against communism, Read instructed historians in their highest role, namely, “education for democracy.” “Total war, whether it be hot or cold,” Read observed, “enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.” Read's prescription has remained a canon in the profession. In 1986, for example, AHA former president C. Vann Woodward owned that historians have “obligations to the present.” Recognizing the problematical nature of the “relationship of history to the public realm,” AHA president William E. Leuchtenburg in like manner nonetheless recently observed that “generation after generation, a substantial corps of scholars has insisted that historians should concentrate on contributing to the solution of contemporary problems.”