Why Americans’ Historical Ignorance Matters
It’s not memorization of facts, it’s the way we think.
It’s long been established that Americans don’t know much about history. Usually, this is expressed in terms of Americans’ factual ignorance. Every few years, there’s a poll that comes out with distressing results, showing that half of Americans don’t know that the Civil War came after the Revolution or that 80% of college graduates couldn’t correctly answer a multiple choice question asking what the Emancipation Proclamation said.
This is pretty bad! It seems that most Americans do not have a coherent narrative of their own history in their heads.
We spend a lot of time arguing about how to interpret our history, but most of us don’t know enough about the facts to do any interpreting. It’s kind of hard to have a national debate about the significance of, say, Reconstruction in American history when only 29% of students at America’s “top 50 colleges” can identify what Reconstruction was.
This is shameful, but I’d argue that there’s an even bigger set of problems with the way in which Americans understand history. Not only do Americans not know their facts and dates, Americans don’t even understand what history is, or how historians produce it.
