While Americans Gobble Up History Books, Colleges Shut Down History Departments

[Valin]

The Federalist

Today, most Americans would quite literally fail the citizenship test. For us to move forward with a shared sense of purpose, we have to know our history.

Jonathan Pidluzny

June 19, 2019

If “reading maketh a full man,” as Sir Francis Bacon avers, Then the New York Times best-seller list is a window into the American soul. To judge from the view, we are an angry, divided, and shallow nation.

A deeper look, however, can give us some hope even in that bleak landscape of elite Americana. One finds several encouraging entries on this week’s predictable slew of political screeds and celebrity tell-alls. David McCullough’s “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West” is an academic history about the settlement of Ohio written in characteristically beautiful prose. A little further down, “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777,” by Rick Atkinson, is the first volume of his Revolutionary War trilogy.

George Will’s “The Conservative Sensibility” is new to the list this week. Quite unlike the political commentaries that routinely rank, Will’s 600-page book is an academically researched “exercise in intellectual archeology” designed to “reveal the Republic’s foundations.”

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Universities Are Turning Their Backs on History

How strange it is that U.S. colleges and universities are abandoning the study of American history and, at some institutions, the study of history altogether. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni evaluates the general education programs of more than 1,100 colleges and universities every year. The 2018–19 report found that only 17 percent of them required any kind of foundational course in American history or government. As of 2016, only four out of the top 25 national universities (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report) required a course in U.S. history in their history majors.

In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that history programs in the United States are struggling to generate student interest. When the American Historical Association drew attention to cratering undergraduate degree production last year—the number of history degrees awarded annually has fallen almost 34 percent since 2011, more steeply than any other discipline in the liberal arts—commentators were quick to blame the mania for STEM education and the perception that the humanities fail to prepare students for the job market.

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