Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn explore, in History on Trial, America's culture wars and specifically, America's battle over its own history. Early chapters of History on Trial look at the conflicts over America's history between what might be called the myth history school, for whom history is the tale of good guys and bad guys and for whom the function of history is to create politically and ideologically correct Americans, and those who view history more as an descriptive and less a normative discipline and for whom history's function is to capture historical reality as accurately as possible, warts and all. One chapter of History on Trial, "History Wars Abroad", Chapter Six, compares and contrasts battles over history beyond the US in other core nations particularly that of the UK where the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher, deregulated the economy while trying, if somewhat unsuccessfully, to regulate, centralise, and dogmatise the history curriculum of the United Kingdom. Chapters Seven through nine explore, from an ethnographic--all three authors were involved in the writing of these voluntary standards--historical, political, and cultural perspective, the battle over the attempt by several American States and the US government, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1990s, to write voluntary kindergarten through grade twelve national standards in science civics, and, particularly in history.
History on Trial is full of hypocrisies that seem an inherent part of the American and human cultural landscape, contradictions some will find both entertaining and absurd. As Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, one of the self appointed leading lights of mythistory, Lynn Cheney, was, while head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, supportive of the attempt to develop voluntary national standards until it became politically expedient, as the Republican Party dixiefied and birchified. to oppose them. Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn also note what has become a central part of the demagogic strategy of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, lie, take things out of context, demonise, and play to the emotions of the masses.
History on Trial is an interesting book, one which offers an excellent short summary of the battles over America's history from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. It is a book that will probably not, however, interest those who think that mythistory is the only true or revealed history. After all, true believers with their our way or the highway approach, leave little if any room for empirical or rational debate.
