The 1776 Commission’s “patriotic education” report apparently thinks we’ve been making too much of the country’s sins and too little of its virtues in our history courses.
That the Trump-formed body did not have any professional historians on it might give one pause inasmuch as American history was the subject.
I’m no historian, but I’ve always thought contrariwise that generally too much is made of the nation’s virtues and too little of its sins, whose number notably includes slavery and — though I’ve seen no mention of it in accounts of the commission’s report — the dispossession (to put it mildly) of Native Americans.
Had Bridgehampton’s students in particular been sufficiently well-informed in social studies courses as to the facts of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement, William Hartwell, Juni Wingfield, and Ava Mack might not have felt the need to launch the East End Unity Club, which, as I said in this space not long ago, took spring-break trips to such historically relevant places as Selma, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chicago — trips that brought the struggle and the forward progress of American history to life.
Unity was the theme of the presidential inauguration, and it was the 22-year-old poet, Amanda Gorman, who, in arguing for it asked in effect that we see history whole, not through biased eyes.
“There is space for grief and horror and hope and unity,” she said in an interview that appeared in The New York Times that morning. “We have to confront these realities if we’re going to move forward.”
I take it, then, that she would have us view our history whole, neither through super patriotic nor through disdainful lenses, and that it is necessary we do it if we are to climb the hill toward recovery, reconciliation, and the light.