January 2011

Back around the beginning of the twentieth century, when royalty was royalty and Imperial Pomp expressed the ultimate in human strutting, the czar of Russia one day held a grand review of his imperial guard and invited all and sundry to come and see.

Ambassadors and foreign military attachés came to the parade ground and for upwards of an hour watched while ten thousand soldiers, who had been drilled to within an inch of their lives, went through their tactical paces with machinelike precision. The long lines moved in perfect unison, broke into marching formation with never a stumble or a shuffle, and finally swung into a long column and came to a halt perfectly aligned, utterly motionless, a fantastic human machine whose thousands of parts had somehow become one.

Profoundly impressed, a military attaché looked down the marblelike wall of human bodies and paid the professional soldier’s ultimate tribute.

Earlier this year the New York Times asked four prominent historians—C. Vann Woodward of Yale, William E. Leuchtenbure of Columbia, Bernard Baihn of Harvard, and Benjamin A. Quarles of Morgan State College—to devise a test that would measure the level of the knowledge of American history of college freshmen. In all, 1,856 first-year students at 194 campuses nationwide were asked forty-two questions—with disheartening results. Inasmuch as readers of American Heritage are obviously interested in our nation’s history, we thought they would like to try the test, too. Herewith is a sampling of those questions. The answers, together with a few comments on commonly made errors, appear on page 92.

1 English colonization differed from Spanish and French colonization in that the English

During the Gold Rush of 1849 and the years that folllowed, San Francisco attracted more than any city’s fair share of eccentrics. But among all the deluded and affected that spilled through the Golden Gate in those early years, one man rose to become perhaps the most successful eccentric in American history: Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana said. The wisdom ofthat American philosopher has fallen on deaf ears in recent years. The study of history—if we believe many of the current generation—is not relevant. Fewer courses in history are offered in schools, and often history is lumped into the educational grab bags of “social sciences” or “American studies.” One result, as a New York Times quiz for college students bore out, is an appalling deficiency in knowledge about the American past.

How did we come to this? What is wrong with the way history is taught today? What is the value of studying it?

At the request of AMERICAN HERITAGE , three noted historians of differing persuasions—Page Smith, codirector of the William James Association, Santa Cruz, California; Eugene D. Genovese. of the University of Rochester; and Richard M. Hunt of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard—offer here their thinking on the issue.

The last half of the nineteenth century was a time of creative progress. Invention, especially the kind that was designed to improve the quality of life, had taken firm hold of the public imagination and would not let go for nearly a century. The average citizen, who would one dayswitch channels out of boredom during an astronaut’ moon walk, regarded such simple devices as flush-toilets and running water with openmouthed amazement. In those days laboratory breakthroughs were front page news. Inventors were heroic figures. By 1900, enthusiasts of all ages knew about Edison and his electric light, George Eastman and his wonderful camera, Marconi’s radio or Daimler’s self-propelling automobile. In 1903 men would leave the surface of the earth and fly in a heavier-than-air machine. Where, a fascinated public wanted to know, would it all end?

If ever there was a year when Americans could look on their works with pride, it was 1902. From the sparsely settled, fledgling nation of a century before, America had become one of the great industrial powers of the globe. Her cities bristled with skyscrapers. Her inventors had given the world the telephone and the electric light. People were chugging around in horseless carriages powered by fuel sucked out of the ground in Texas. The American fleet could hold its own against the navies of Europe, not to mention the forces of the banana republics we were snaffling up. Within the next two years, American steam shovels would be chewing away at the isthmus of Panama.

In October, 1973, Arab states clapped an embargo on oil shipments to the United States. All at once the nation had to go on daylight-saving time, throttle back on the highways, and turn down thermostats. Millions of baffled Americans found themselves lining up, sometimes for hours, at filling-station pumps. Up to that moment Americans had paid little heed to the quarrels of the Middle East. Until the Second World War that part of the globe had been strictly a British problem. Now suddenly the impact of events in the blazing deserts east of the Mediterranean fell hard upon the United States.

It was oil that got us so deeply involved in the Middle East. America’s commitment to Israel, important as the immediate cause of the embargo, was a later development; in the beginning was the oil.

Back home at Mount Vernon after the Revolution, George Washington turned his energies toward increasing his plantation’s yield and reducing expenses. Among other projects, he wanted to replace farm horses with mules, which he prized for “their longevity and cheap keeping.” Most American mules, however, were too small to pull heavy wagons and farm implements.

The General had heard of jackasses in Spain of such size and strength that a royal edict prohibited their exportation for breeding. But the king, Charles III, learned of Washington’s interest through a diplomat, and in August, 1785, he sent a fine specimen as a gift to the American hero.

Washington was delighted with the Spanish jackass’s size and conformation: “about 15 hands high, his body and limbs very large in proportion to his height.” Awaiting this paragon, whom the General named Royal Gift, was a harem of thirty-three mares and fillies.

The low-lying Delta—six and a half million acres of land rich with soil left by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in flood—was first opened to a cotton-hungry world in the mid-1820’s. The price of cotton was high. The profitable bluff country along the Mississippi had already been pre-empted. Second sons and questing newcomers were pressing for a chance of their own.

There were Indians then from whom to force treaties and land. No sooner had Choctaws put their mark on treaties at Doak’s Stand and Dancing Rabbit Creek than caravans of white men swarmed westward from the tired lands of Georgia and Alabama. Families and bachelors floated down the Mississippi from Kentucky and Tennessee to claim the low alluvial shores or the high-banked bayous shooting off from the unleveed river. They brought their labor with them or acquired more as needed from New Orleans or Memphis. The units of labor were slaves and oxen.