Or write American history as if from thousands of years in the future. Give up on newness and jump straight to American age. Admit that the Constitution is a terrible scripture. Perhaps write of America not as something “great” but as something small, tawdry, and provisional. It could be structured around a frank acknowledgement of American decay. 1ģ It is intriguing to imagine a narrative that altogether relinquishes this generic civic obligation. We know, implicitly, that the yelling lets us carry on. As Sacvan Bercovitch argued, both the Jeremiah doing the yelling and the listeners doing the hearing are already in on the rhetoric. The textbook, like the jeremiad, recalls founding ideals and chastises the present for not living up to them. If the historian is committed to democracy, as most textbook writers are, then the agents of history are presumed to be “the people.” We the people need a national history because, after all, America still exists, and the course of our history will depend, tautologically, on us-the same us that is also, in theory, history’s readers. The journalist (.)Ģ Most textbooks push that ending back by returning, in those final pages that few students ever read, to founding principles-to the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence, say, or in the Constitution’s preamble-and concluding with the hope that American reality will one day meet them. 1 Sacvan Bercovitch, American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
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