It was a beautiful sunny day in Lugang Township in central Taiwan when I visited the Tianhou Temple. The detail was extraordinary, almost as much as the throngs of observant believers performing rituals; the smell of incense lent this place extraordinary texture.
In her defense of Glenn Beck, and without any direct evidence, Amity Schlaes has determined the history professors. In a recent piece on the conservative blog RealClearPolitics, Schlaes argues that “In the field of history, the guild also maintains a monopoly on education by generating curricula, syllabi, and, of course, a canon, a set list of texts for each period of the past.” She provides no evidence for this claim, and in fact ignores the most obvious evidence about historians’ influence. First, she cannot point to any mechanism, beyond the influence of a thesis advisor on a graduate student’s scholarship, as to how the “guild” controls its members. Indeed, there is no mechanism for the enforcement of historical ideas once a graduate student has moved beyond the reach of their advisor. And, if the training system does sometimes produce uniformity and obscurity, that is not the same as producing uncritical guild control over classrooms. Has she looked carefully at the ways that the Organization of American Historians controls the “guild.” Show us evidence, Ms. Schlaes.
As for historians’ impact on the broader society, if that happens anywhere it happens in the area of K-12 school curricula. If she were to take a systematic look at American History textbooks, she would discover the degree to which they repeat a sort of patriotic exceptionalism about American History. Coverage of most topics is so broad as to be almost meaningless. And, the ability of historians to craft school curricula beyond universities–which not even a plurality of Americans graduate from–is minimal. History standards are written by state and local groups, often educators and not practicing historians, with little or no representation of professional historians. Conservative voices are powerfully included and heard in national debates about curricula as well. Indeed, if she were to read the work of Gary Nash, review the state standards and the procedures the go into making them in many states, Schlaes would discover just how little influence this “guild” has collectively. Indeed, has Ms. Schlaes seen the way that Texas is changing its curriculum, which is far more influential on school curriculum than anything being promoted by the American Historical Association.
Schlaes defends Glenn Beck with the same sort of unsupported generalizations, the same lies and deceptions, the same anti-intellectualism, that Beck himself employs.
I may write more later, if I have a moment. I hope other historians publicly repudiate Amity Schlaes for her ridiculous anti-intellectualism and the demagoguery of her support for Glenn Beck.
