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Introduction:
Scenes from a Survey
"How Do Americans Understand Their Pasts?"
Beginning an Inquiry, Spring 1989
On Monday morning, May 15, 1989, ten people
crowded around the dining-room table at the Chateau
Delaware, a nineteenth-century stone mansion in
Indianapolis. The mansion--recently converted into
a bed-and-breakfast--seemed an appropriate setting
for a retreat devoted to mapping previously
uncharted intersections between present and past.
We looked out on a historic block--Benjamin
Harrison's house was down Delaware Street--in a
neighborhood just north of the city's thoroughly
modern downtown. Next door, another mansion housed
the Indiana Humanities Council.
The retreat itself was the brainchild of Allie
Stuart, a program officer with the Council. A few
months earlier, she had invited David Thelen to
lunch at a Cajun cafe in Bloomington to talk about
better ways of connecting academic historians with
larger audiences. Dave had said that he knew
several professionals at universities and museums
who shared the same dream, and mused that it would
be great to get them together. He remembers choking
on his Diet Coke when Allie replied that the
Indiana Humanities Council would provide the
funding for such a conference if Dave would invite
participants and report their ideas.
The defining moment of the weekend--and the
birth of this book--occurred that first morning as
we went around the table, sharing our concerns
about the practice of professional history. Person
after person described struggles to imagine or
build alternatives that might break down barriers
between professionals and wider audiences. As we
talked, it became clear that we shared the
conviction that professional historians were
painfully unaware of how people outside their own
circles understood and used the past. We discussed
books we'd read and experiments we'd tried, and as
these began to mount, we felt a sense of
excitement--a sense that we, the individuals in
that room, might actually be able to make a
difference in narrowing the gap.
John Gillis, who was leading a project on the
historical construction of identities at Rutgers
University, said his research had led him to see
the history that families create as a rich
alternative to academic history. D. D. Hilke,
director of audience research at the National
Museum of American History, described her
ethnographic studies of how museum visitors turned
exhibits into things they recognized from their own
experience. Philip Scarpino, John Bodnar, and
Michael Frisch, leaders in the fields of oral
history and public history, discussed oral
historians' attempts to share authority--to create
history jointly with the people they interviewed.
The historians around the table reported on studies
and theories from many fields that investigated the
ways Americans use the past in their everyday
lives, screening professional "texts" (museum
exhibits, books, movies) through these everyday
uses.
We spent the rest of the weekend trying to
design ways of improving exchanges between
professional and popular historians. Someone would
grab a Magic Marker, write four or five themes on a
piece of paper, and drape it over the back of a
chair. Then someone else would impose a second
dimension and turn the list into a grid. On grids
and maps we constructed models that compared
professional historymaking with that done by
individuals in their daily lives, by television
producers, by advertisers, by leaders of ethnic and
religious groups, and by collectors.
How should we proceed? Each of us had brought
along favorite ideas for projects, and we dreamed
up more on the spot: ethnographic observation of
people in natural settings; in-depth interviews
with people who pursue history as a hobby;
participant observation of the uses of history in
family conversations; textual analyses of diaries
or memoirs; experiments that ask people to
visualize the past by having them draw a picture of
what history looks like to them. While this group
of humanists had ingrained skepticism about the
scientific claims of survey research, some of us
were enthusiastic about surveying a cross section
of Americans. We believed that this would allow us
to listen to people as they used the past in their
daily lives, to map out patterns, and to define
starting points for deeper investigations.
As we tried to define the questions to
investigate, we used terms like "historical
consciousness" and "historical memory." At one
point somebody threw out the phrase "popular
historymaking." Many of us liked its implication
that Americans take an active role in using and
understanding the past--that they're not just
passive consumers of histories constructed by
others.
The intensity and urgency of our conversation
that weekend grew out of the conjunction of two
historical circumstances. Writing a few months
later in one of the dozens of internal documents
generated by the group, Michael Frisch captured
this intellectual and political moment: "The study
and understanding of history occupies a paradoxical
and problematic place in contemporary American
culture. On the one hand, it is widely believed
that we face a general crisis of historical
amnesia; on the other hand, there is clearly
enormous and growing public interest in history,
manifest in museum attendance, historically
oriented tourism, participation in festivals, and
even the media-driven excesses of nostalgia and
commemoration of recent historical
periods."1
We met in an atmosphere of both crisis and
excitement, Roy recalls, about the state of
historymaking in America. In the late 1980s,
much-publicized jeremiads warned ominously of
historical amnesia and historical illiteracy
suffocating the nation. Shortly before Dave began
to plan the Indianapolis meeting, Lynne Cheney,
then chairman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, had issued a pamphlet called
American Memory, which began with the
declaration: "A refusal to remember . . . is a
primary characteristic of our
nation."2
The historians gathered in Indianapolis thought
that the real issue was not, as pundits were
declaring, what Americans did not know about the
past but what they did know and think.
Incredibly, since many commentators had surveyed
American ignorance, no one had actually
investigated how Americans understood and used the
past. And we believed that we needed to seek out
and listen to the voices of the people who were
being denounced for their ignorance.
Our motivations were more complex than a desire
to offer a different perspective on what would
become known as the culture wars and the history
wars. We also approached the question of "how
Americans understand the past" from the opposite
direction--from excitement rather than worry, from
our perception of deep public fascination with the
past. Here, the historical context was not the
conservative assault on historical illiteracy but
the emergence, starting in the late 1960s, of what
was called "public history" or "people's
history."
Carried along by the social movements of the
1960s and 1970s, many advocates of people's history
and public history saw the past as a source of
empowerment and political mobilization. They wanted
to democratize not just the content of history
(adding the stories of African Americans,
industrial workers, immigrants, women, and gays)
but also its practice; they wanted to turn
audiences into collaborators. In the 1970s and
1980s some of us had begun collaborating with new
audiences through museums and state humanities
councils, historical films, community oral history
programs, and trade union historical classes. These
successes inspired us at the Chateau Delaware.
But our failures also goaded us. While we and
others of our generation had widened the topics,
voices, methods, and viewpoints that scholars
called "history"--indeed, this success had provoked
the conservative counterattack--we had been less
successful in turning audiences into partners. In a
paper he presented that weekend, Dave argued that
the major barrier to such collaboration came not
from conservatives but from scholars who had failed
to overcome habits of professionalization.
Reporting responses from a thousand readers to a
Journal of American History survey, he noted
that an increasingly voluminous, fragmented, and
specialized scholarship--though wonderfully rich
and diverse--seemed "narrow, overspecialized, and
boring" even to many Journal
subscribers.3
As we contemplated reaching outside our
professional circles, we realized how little we
knew about the values and perspectives Americans
were bringing from their personal experiences to
these historical dialogues. To help create a
history that would extend beyond the content and
practice of elites, we needed to hear a much wider
range of people tell us about how (or even whether)
the past mattered to them.
Because many of us in Indianapolis had
contributed to an emerging body of scholarship on
popular historical consciousness and historical
memory,4
we were particularly aware of the limitations of
this scholarship. It told much more about how the
past had been popularly presented than about how it
had been popularly understood. Historians had begun
to look at the presentations of the past in
textbooks, children's books, movies, museums, and
magazines, but we often fell back on speculation
when it came time to talk about what people made of
those sources. We had been influenced by the
movement to write "history from the bottom up," but
we had done little to uncover popular historical
consciousness at its most obvious source--the
perspectives of a cross section of Americans.
By the late 1980s, scholars from many fields
were decrying this omission and developing theories
and methods to study popular reception, reader
response, and visitor behavior. The studies in
these new fields suggested that Americans engaged
historical texts (and all cultural forms) in ways
molded by their own personalities, experiences, and
traditions and that their engagements were often
quite different from what producers of those texts
had hoped for.5
These overlapping practical, political, and
scholarly agendas heated up our conversations in
Indianapolis and propelled us forward. As we
circulated position papers and met once again, we
evolved a concrete plan and sketched out a number
of ambitious projects.
One of them was a national survey.
Piloting the Survey, October 1990-January
1992
On October 19, 1990, we walked through the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History,
acutely aware of the presence of the past. Time
frames shifted and merged; the air seemed saturated
with their fluidity. Hundreds of visitors streamed
by exhibits of eighteenth-century chairs and
nineteenth-century guns and twentieth-century cars,
intently scrutinizing these artifacts or chatting
with their companions about what they'd
observed.
That afternoon four of us (D. D. Hilke, Roy
Rosenzweig, Dave Thelen, and Lois Silverman, who
had recently come to work at Indiana University on
history projects) met in one of the museum's
conference rooms to brainstorm about the popular
historymakers outside the door. What did they make
of what they were seeing? What questions would
allow them, and Americans like them, to open up to
us--to speak candidly about how they used and
understood the past?
D. D. and Lois had both studied the responses of
museum visitors; they pointed us in useful
directions, helping to hone and refine questions
for a survey of popular historymaking. By the end
of the meeting, we'd come up with an eclectic list
that covered both historical activities (How often
do you visit history museums? Have you done any
research--formal or informal--into your family's
history?) and attitudes (What do you think of when
you hear the word history/past/heritage/tradition?
Where do you go for trustworthy information on the
Civil War, the Vietnam War, and your family's
history? Do you use a knowledge of the past in
everyday life?). It was time to take the questions
on the road for their first tryout.
In January 1991 fifteen graduate students in the
Public History Program at Arizona State University
joined Dave for a week-long course designed to test
and refine the questions we had come up with. For
him, Dave recalls, the challenge of turning vision
into reality took concrete form in Tempe. The first
morning began with some rough questions we hoped
might lead people to talk about their uses of the
past. Each afternoon students would conduct two- or
three-hour-long open-ended interviews with people
of all ages and educational backgrounds from the
rich ethnic mix of people in Phoenix. (All
together, they interviewed 135 people that week.)
The next morning the class would compare results,
trying to find wording that had elicited the
richest responses. At the end of the week, students
wrote essays about the questions that had worked
best and the themes that had emerged during the
interviews.
The conversations reported by these students
convinced us that we needed to pay attention to how
we introduced our topic. History is the word
that scholars privilege to describe how they
approach the past. But in Phoenix history
conjured up something done by famous people that
others studied in school; respondents said history
was formal, analytical, official, or distant. Words
like heritage and tradition conjured
up warm and fuzzy feelings but not very rich
experience or sharp observation. The past
was the term that best invited people to talk about
family, race, and nation, about where they had come
from and what they had learned along the way.
Trust was the concept that best captured how
people viewed sources of information about the
past. And the metaphor that best captured what
mattered to them in the past could be elicited by
the concept of connection. To which pasts
did they feel most connected?
A few months later, graduate students at the
University of Toledo took our questions into the
field. These and other trials convinced us that it
was time to carry out the project in a systematic,
nationwide manner. But that required money--around
$200,000. Our best bet, the National Endowment for
the Humanities, turned us down initially. In the
summer of 1993, we hatched a last-ditch funding
scheme that sought money from a consortium of state
humanities councils.
As we worked on that complicated series of
proposals, we received unexpected good news: we had
received a $25,000 chairman's discretionary grant
from the Spencer Foundation and the NEH had
reconsidered its rejection of our proposal. In the
winter of 1993-94, we suddenly had money to carry
out the survey we had conceived in Indianapolis
three and a half years before.
Listening to Americans Talk About the Past:
Bloomington, Indiana,March 1994
On March 7, 1994, we crowded around the desk in
the office of John Kennedy, director of the Center
for Survey Research at Indiana University,
listening to amplified snatches of telephone
conversations. With some trepidation, we had just
begun a week of what survey professionals call
pretesting. Having thought and talked about this
survey for almost five years, we were finally
getting a chance to try out our questions through
random telephone calling. The pretesting might be
less politely and more accurately called
eavesdropping. John Kennedy would push a button,
and his office would be filled with voices from an
interview in progress. Next door, in a large room
segmented into small cubicles, half a dozen Indiana
University students talked on the telephone. As
these young interviewers conversed, they stared at
computer screens that generated questions for them
to ask and space for them to type in answers. The
process was mechanistic, but the conversations
themselves were intensely human.
Person after person was willing--even eager--to
talk. We felt a rush of excitement and relief.
Anyone who has been interrupted at dinner by phone
calls from salespeople and solicitors (and who in
the 1990s has not?) knows the strong temptation to
slam down the phone. But that week more than forty
people spent half an hour talking with a stranger
from Indiana. For many of them, the past was
clearly part of the rhythm of everyday life. We
listened as a government office clerk told an
interviewer: "When you think about the past, you
feel comfortable, like you belong, and that is the
way I feel with my family."
We had feared that a telephone survey would
evoke vague or abstract responses. But people took
the past personally: many of their answers were
vivid, candid, creative, passionate. We had fretted
that people might not reveal their deepest
feelings. On the contrary, emotions often ran high
in the conversations we overheard. Several people
shared intimate details about their past and their
present. One woman described being sexually abused.
Another started to cry when asked to talk about the
person from the past--her mother--who had
particularly affected her.
That week we were often moved by the powerful
presence of the past. But we had work to do. We
were trying to refine the survey--to decide which
questions gave us the richest answers, to come up
with final wording for those questions. We wanted
to feel that we had taken full advantage of every
phone call, that the interviewer had given the
person at the other end of the telephone line the
most compelling invitation to talk.
Every evening at ten or eleven o'clock, when the
students had finished their interviews, they met
with us to discuss which prompts and follow-ups had
worked and which hadn't. We learned, for example,
that we got next to nothing when we asked
historians' favorite question--Why did you do
something?--but we got wonderful answers when we
asked how or when or with whom, when we asked
respondents to elaborate on an experience. The
interviewers were our collaborators. We'd all sit
around a table and toss out alternative wordings.
(We describe our methods in fuller detail in
appendix 1.)
By the time the week was over, we had confirmed
some of the hunches we had had at the Chateau
Delaware--about both the depth and variety of
popular historymaking and the value of surveying a
cross section of Americans. We felt exhilarated,
but also a little worried. Nothing in our
professional training had prepared us to interpret
what we were hearing. With the help of these
terrific student interviewers, we were getting
transcripts of rich conversations, but how would we
find general patterns to make sense of these
individual encounters?
Interpreting Patterns of Popular
Historymaking: Arlington, Virginia, June
1994
On June 5, 1994, the past lay piled up on the
porch of Roy's house in Arlington, Virginia. It lay
on our laps in thick spiral-bound volumes and
printouts of computer-generated tables as we tried
to get a hold on what we had learned since March.
How do Americans understand their pasts?
The data in front of us were somewhat
overwhelming. Between March and June, John
Kennedy's survey team had called almost all the 808
people who would make up the "national sample." The
calls had taken about thirty minutes each.
Interviewers had devoted about ten minutes of each
call to asking closed-ended (and hence readily
quantifiable) questions like: "During the past
twelve months, have you read any books about the
past?" They used the rest of the time for follow-up
questions like "What were the reasons you looked
into the history of your family or worked on your
family tree?" In an innovation in standard survey
practice, the interviewers had been allowed to use
humor, interjections, and more probing questions
("Can you recall any of the history books you
read?") to get people to open up. Typing as rapidly
as possible, the interviewers transcribed
respondents' answers. Those transcripts filled the
formidable spiral volumes stacked before us.
Although the national survey was not quite done
and we were still planning three "minority" samples
that would eventually reach more than six hundred
African Americans, Mexican Americans, and American
Indians, we decided that this was a good moment to
compare notes on what we had gathered so far and
describe to each other the headlines that leaped
out at us from the data.
From the start we saw that the interviews were
filled with intimate talk about the past. Families
and their stories dominated the numbers as well as
the words. For the people we called, the past was
pervasive, a natural part of everyday life, central
to any effort to live in the present. By June, our
quick impressions from listening to the pretest
interviews could be confirmed by the statistical
evidence. Looking at the tables, we found
overwhelming evidence that Americans participated
regularly in a wide range of past-related
"activities," from taking photos to preserve
memories, to watching historical films and
television programs, to taking part in groups
involved in preserving or presenting the past. We
also found that people said they felt particularly
connected to the past in a range of different
settings, from museums and historical sites to
gatherings with their families.
If the past was omnipresent in these interviews,
"history" as it is usually defined in textbooks was
not. This absence of conventional historical
narratives and frameworks surprised us. Roy recalls
that he had assumed we would hear people talking
about how the defeat of the South in the Civil War,
the struggle to settle Montana, or the victory of
the auto workers in the 1937 sit-down strikes
shaped their identities or their current political
views. He had expected to gather stories about how
grandparents had faced "No Irish Need Apply" signs
or had been barred from neighborhoods because they
were Jewish. But these stories weren't there.
Neither were the narratives of American national
progress--the landing of the Pilgrims, the winning
of the American Revolution, the writing of the
Constitution, the settling of the West--that have
been told for generations in grade school classes
and high school textbooks.
Dave remembers our excitement as we discovered
that each of us had separately identified the same
social traits as consistently important to
respondents and others as strangely
unimportant--strange because the absent traits were
ones that scholars presumed to be essential in
determining values and behavior. We had
independently concluded that social class, regional
identity, political conviction, and ethnicity among
whites were much less important in shaping
respondents' understanding of the past than race
(particularly for blacks and Indians) and religion
(particularly for evangelicals of all kinds).
Black respondents started out sounding like
white respondents as they talked about the
importance of the family. But most of them quickly
moved beyond their families to talk of African
Americans. In extending out from the family to
broader historical narratives, black respondents
shared a common set of references--slavery, the
civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King
Jr.--that we couldn't find in the interviews with
European Americans. Black respondents not only
constructed group narratives and drew on materials
from the conventional canon of American history
(like the story of slavery), they also presented
stories that fit the standard narrative of group
progress. A 42-year-old African American from
Milwaukee said he was born in Mississippi, where
"you always got to say yes ma'am and no ma'am," but
that thanks to the civil rights movement, "we don't
have to be on the back of the bus."
Sitting on the porch that afternoon, we got an
inkling that Native Americans also tended to move
from family stories to group stories and connect to
larger national narratives. Asked why he rated the
history of his "racial or ethnic group" as most
important to him, one man said, "I'm an Indian. We
got screwed out of everything that was ours, pushed
aside." The national sample--which reached 76
African Americans, 33 Latinos, 20 American Indians,
and 13 Asian Americans--did not include enough
minority voices for us to be sure about these
conclusions. But we couldn't ignore what we
saw.
Since the transcripts were reported by case
number and not by demographic characteristic, we
had to refer to a separate record when we wanted to
know about the social characteristics of a
respondent. As we read transcripts without
reference to demographic features, we thought we
could almost always tell whether a respondent was
black or Indian. Since we hadn't asked about
religion, we both were struck by how important
religion was for evangelicals in ordering their
perspectives on family and nation alike. We, two
secular scholars, were so puzzled by this finding
that at dinner that night we kept talking about it
with Deborah Kaplan, Roy's very patient wife, who
shared our attempts to understand the implications
of a society in which the only things that seemed
really to unite some blacks and some whites in
their uses of the past were their commitments to
family and evangelical religion.
Understanding How Americans Understand the
Past, May 1995-June 1997
On May 16, 1995, six years after our meeting in
Indianapolis, we sat around another dining-room
table, this time at Roy's house in Arlington. We'd
moved beyond "data" to our interpretation of the
data, organized into rough drafts of chapters. Our
training as historians did not equip us to handle
the rich and messy responses we heard. (During the
nine months of the survey, interviewers spent a
thousand hours talking to 1,500 Americans. The
transcripts of those conversations totaled about
850,000 words and the statistical summary of the
answers that could be tabulated covered several
hundred pages.) On many big questions we nodded in
agreement, but on many specific issues we argued
for different frameworks or interpretations.
We have come to understand that, given the
intractable and unfamiliar material we're
analyzing, different responses to the same
information are inevitable. Our long conversations
(and sometimes arguments) have led us to a joint
interpretation of most of the data--but not all of
it. Over the next two years we returned on many
occasions to the interviews themselves, questioning
and revising our interpretations. Our different
interpretive preferences and styles--for example,
Roy's tendency to comment on group distinctions and
Dave's tendency to emphasize shared human
qualities--inevitably shaped these chapters.
We concluded that we could best make our
different emphases into strengths by writing
separate chapters, so that each wrote about the
material he most cared about. Roy drafted chapters
1, 5, 6, and appendix 1; Dave drafted chapters 2,
3, and 4. And we have written separate statements
for the conclusion--not only because we sometimes
disagree, but also because individual afterthoughts
seem particularly appropriate to a book built on
the experience and belief of individual Americans.
We thought that this division of labor both solved
the problem of getting the data reported in book
form and conveyed that we agreed on the large
patterns buried in these stories and disagreed more
often on the weight or centrality to assign to
those patterns.
Chapter 1 ("The Presence of the Past: Patterns
of Popular History-making") provides an overview of
what we heard from the 1,453 Americans who told us
about the ubiquitous presence of the past in their
everyday lives. More than one third had
investigated the history of their family in the
previous year; two fifths had worked on a hobby or
collection related to the past. For most of the
people who talked with us, the familial and
intimate past, along with intimate uses of other
pasts, matters most. They prefer the personal and
firsthand because they feel at home with that past:
they live with it, relive it, interpret and
reinterpret it; they use it to define themselves,
their place in their families, and their families'
place in the world.
In chapter 2 ("Using the Past to Live in the
Present") and chapter 3 ("Revisiting the Past to
Shape the Future") we listen to Americans talk
about their intimate uses of the past--about how
they engage the past to live their lives.
Individuals turn to their personal experiences to
grapple with questions about where they come from
and where they are heading, who they are and how
they want to be remembered. Again and again, the
Americans we interviewed said they want to make a
difference, to take responsibility for themselves
and others. And so they assemble their experiences
into patterns, narratives that allow them to make
sense of the past, set priorities, project what
might happen next, and try to shape the future. By
using these narratives to mark change and
continuity, they chart the course of their
lives.
The people who told us they want to get as close
to experience as possible--to use the past on their
own terms--also recognize the need to reach toward
people who have lived in other times and other
places. Chapter 4 (" 'Experience Is the Best
Teacher': Participation, Mediation, Authority,
Trust") follows Americans as they move beyond
firsthand experience in search of sources with
trustworthy perspectives on the past. Many
respondents said they fear being manipulated by
people who distort the past to meet their own
needs--whether commercial greed, political
ambition, or cultural prejudice. In their desire to
strip away layers of mediation, respondents trust
eyewitnesses more than television or movies. They
feel connected to the past in museums because
authentic artifacts seem to transport them straight
back to the times when history was being made. They
feel unconnected to the past in history classrooms
because they don't recognize themselves in the
version of the past presented there. When asked to
describe studying history in school, they most
often use the words dull and
irrelevant.
The Americans we surveyed do not reject all
aspects of national history; they simply reject
nation-centered accounts they were forced to
memorize and regurgitate in school. Chapter 5
("Beyond the Intimate Past: Americans and Their
Collective Pasts") explores the ways individuals
reach into history by reaching out of their own
lives. As they build bridges between personal pasts
and larger historical stories,
Americans--especially white Americans--tend to
personalize the public past. African Americans,
American Indians, and evangelical Christians
sometimes construct a wider set of usable pasts,
building ties to their communities as well as their
families. Mexican Americans occupy a figurative--as
well as geographical--borderland. Like white
European Americans, they rely on family pasts as
they work through multiple allegiances and sort out
fundamental issues of identity, but they also draw
on their ethnic and national roots. Unlike white
European Americans, Mexican Americans tell a
version of the traditional national narrative of
progress: they talk about getting closer to owning
a piece of the American dream.
In chapter 6 ("History in Black and Red") we
hear another version of the national narrative--one
with a bitter twist. In this counternarrative, the
arrival of Columbus, the westward movement of
European settlers, slavery and emancipation, wars
and treaties at home and abroad add up to an
American history in which blacks and Indians have
been oppressed and betrayed by whites, who then
depict their actions in movies and textbooks that
lie about Indians and exclude African Americans. A
collective voice comes easily to these two groups.
African Americans speak of "our race," "our roots,"
"our people"; American Indians speak of "our
history," "our heritage," "our culture," "our
tribe." The "we" they invoke stands in sharp
opposition to the triumphal American "we": the
narrative of the American nation-state--the story
often told by professional historians--is most
alive for those who feel most alienated from it.
This departure from conventional wisdom, like so
many other insights that emerged during survey
interviews, eloquently supports the hunch we
discussed that weekend in Indianapolis:
professional history practitioners have much to
learn from listening to Americans talk about how
they use and understand the past.
Notes
1. Michael
Frisch, "Cracking the Nutshell: Making
History-Making," unpublished document, 20 September
1989, in possession of authors. Back.
2. Lynne V.
Cheney, American Memory: A Report on Humanities
in the Nation's Public Schools (National
Endowment for the Humanities, undated but published
in September 1987), 5. (Cheney is approvingly
quoting the poet Czelaw Milosz.) See also Chester
Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch, "Survey Results: U.S.
17-Year-Olds Know Shockingly Little About History
and Literature," The American School Board
Journal 174 (Oct. 1987): 31-33, as quoted in
Dale Whittington, "What Have 17-Year-Olds Known in
the Past?" American Educational Research
Journal 28 (Winter 1991): 763; Diane Ravitch
and Chester Finn Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds
Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of
History and Literature (New York: Harper &
Row, 1987). There is a large literature debating
the work of Ravitch and Finn. For one brief
critique, see William Ayers, "What Do 17-Year-Olds
Know? A Critique of Recent Research," Education
Digest 53 (Apr. 1988): 37-39. Back.
3. David Thelen, "How Do
Americans Understand Their Pasts? A Second Working
Draft," unpublished paper, April 1989, in
possession of authors.
Back.
4. See, for
example, the essays in Journal of American
History 75 (4) (March 1989) (special issue on
"Memory and American History") and in Susan Porter
Benson, Steve Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig,
Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the
Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1986). Back.
5. See, for
example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance:
Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1984). See also Robert Merton, Mass Persuasion:
The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1946); David Morley,
The Nationwide Audience: Structure and
Decoding (London: British Film Institute,
1980); Doris A. Graber, Processing the News: How
People Tame the Information Tide (New York:
Longman, 1984); Patricia Palmer, The Lively
Audience: A Study of Children Around the TV Set
(Sydney and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986); John
Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen,
1987), chapter 6. Back.
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