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The most visible historical conflicts of the 1990s have not led to slaughter on the field of battle, but they have promoted acrimony, anguished commentary, rhetorical overkill, and bitter ideological recriminations. The books and articles covering several of the major incidents show how complex these disputes are. They also reveal how much these well-publicized, angry confrontations in the public square are entangled with some of our era's most esoteric academic debates. Those debates, which we might call intellectual fallout from the history wars, will be the subject of a future essay in BOOKS & CULTURE. Here the question is what can be learned from the angry public debates themselves.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that history battles, like military engagements, are not identical. Books and articles on the National History Standards and the canceled Smithsonian exhibit illustrate such differences clearly. To lump these conflicts together as simply two episodes in a great struggle between craven leftists and good-hearted patriots—or between dispassionate seekers of truth and atavistic barbarians of the Right—is too simple, and simply false. For the National History Standards, it was a clash between rival conceptions of what history should do. For the Smithsonian, it was a clash between rival conceptions of what history is. Although issues of intellectual substance surfaced in both disputes, only in the debate over the National History Standards did that substance emerge clearly. By contrast, public uproar at the Smithsonian led not to intellectual clarity, but to a macabre squaring of the ideological circle.

The idea for the standards came from efforts by the Reagan and Bush administrations to shore up traditional learning in the nation's public schools. To that end, Lynne Cheney, who served as director of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 1986 to 1992, commissioned a number of academics and teachers to prepare "national standards" for various fields of study. For history, the NEH turned to a group of academics and educators at UCLA. The chair of this group was Gary Nash, a student of colonial America who is widely known among historians for works on the ethnic diversity of early American experience and also on the contributions of the inarticulate lower classes to the American Revolution. The book that Nash and his colleagues have now written, History on Trial, is a blow-by-blow account of how the standards came to be written and of the controversy they engendered.

As originally drafted, the standards appeared in late October 1994 in four guidebooks. Eventually they were revised and then issued as three books: a general guide for the lower grades, and for the upper grades one each on world history and American history. The standards combined teaching objectives directed toward what students should "understand" and how they "should be able to" put historical information to use in "analyzing … assessing … comparing … appraising" historical problems and situations. In the first published draft, these objectives were operationalized through many "teaching examples." These "teaching examples" contained much of the material that would offend the conservative critics. They were considerably cut back in the revised version.

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