The best of times, the worst of times.

"This is a bad time to be a social historian," Tony Judt announced in History Workshop in the spring of 1979. If so, it was a "bad time" for which we can now feel nostalgic. Like Peter Stearns in 1994, Judt was worried about what could be called a "political crisis of social history." But, unlike Steams who rightly directs our attention toward external political attacks, Judt saw the threat from within, from what he viewed as a "dominant tendency" of academic social history writing to be "both philistine and conservative."(1)

This "conservative" tendency seems to have escaped the notice of conservative politicians and pundits who issue almost daily attacks on the work that social historians have done in the decade and a half since Judt berated them for "terminological neutrality and objective analysis."(2) I say "the work that social historians have done rather than "social history," because the current political attacks are not about the field per se but rather about two characteristics of much, but far from all, work in history - a view of the past that is critical and inclusive. Of course, social history can also be celebratory and exclusive - "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," after all, is a form of social history - and such work is unlikely to come under attack.

But it is precisely because, as Peter Stearns correctly observes, much social history does not take as its "principal task the glorification of real or imagined American ideals" and sees "large groups of people, including lower-class or racial minority groups, as significant subjects of historical study" that it has received so much recent political heat. Conservatives have, for example, particularly targeted Gary Nash because he has favored history that meets both of these criteria. The National Standards for United States History, for which he was the project co-director, were repeatedly (and sometimes dishonestly) attacked for talking about too many women and minorities and, hence, not enough Great White Men. In her Wall Street Journal op-ed piece of October 20, 1994, which launched the massive assault on the history standards, Lynne Cheney complained that Harriet Tubman was "mentioned six times," whereas Paul Revere, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Edison received nary a reference.(3) Similarly, columnist John Leo slammed the standards for asking students to learn about such allegedly trivial figures as Mercy Otis Warren ("a minor poet and playwright" included only "so the founders of the nation won't seem so distressingly male") and shoemaker and leader of the Stamp Act demonstrations, Ebenezer Macintosh, whom Leo derided as a "brawling street lout of the 1760s" who was mentioned merely because he was "anti-elitist."(4)

The attack on the inclusiveness of the history standards and other work rooted in the historical scholarship of the past three decades quickly broadened into an attack on its point of view, its willingness to view the rich and powerful with less than the proper reverence and its unwillingness to celebrate American greatness. Leo described the standards as "sour and negative." Cheney similarly claimed "they make it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim."(5) Not content to go after the standards that Nash had helped organize, Cheney also attacked his high school textbook, American Odyssey, lambasting him for spending too much time on McCarthyism and Watergate, and making the book "gloomier than the story of the United States ought to be."(6)

In these attacks on history that is both encompassing and suspicious of traditional pieties, the most common charge leveled by conservative politicians and pundits is that of "political correctness." Rush Limbaugh denounced the history standards as "an intellectually dishonest, politically correct version of American history," which ought to be "flushed down the toilet." Charles Krauthammer described them as a "classic of political correctness." Newt Gingrich complained that the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit reflected "political correctness seeping in and distorting and prejudicing the Smithsonian's exhibits." And John Leo even managed to describe the venerable American Historical Association as "hopelessly PC."(7)

The charge was, of course, particularly ironic, since it reverses the usual meaning of this now-hackneyed phrase, which originated as a description of efforts to limit public discussion and silence those who lack the "politically correct" viewpoint. Satirizing "political correctness" in their Officially Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf promise to "tell you what's OK to say to whom, what isn't, and why" and "what opinions and concepts are acceptable, and which ones you're just going to have to discard."(8) Who could ask for a better definition of the intellectual straightjacket Cheney, Limbaugh, and company want to fasten on historians? In the new version of the "standards," slavery, Indian removal, and the internment of Japanese Americans all become verboten subjects because they are too "grim" or "sour."

This conservative version of "political correctness"-or what some have taken to calling "patriotic correctness"-serves as the overarching rubric for attacks on history that is both comprehensive and skeptical of conventional pieties. I learned this first hand this past winter when I had my own small brush with the new historical police. I want to briefly describe that episode both because it illustrates the ways in which these two different charges become quickly merged together and suggests some possible avenues of response to the current assault.

In the summer of 1993, I and my colleagues Steve Brier and Josh Brown completed one of the first CD-ROMs in American history, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, which was published by the Voyager Company. The disk is organized around four chapters from a survey book on American history that the American Social History Project published in 1992.(9) Added to that "spine" are a series of 200 "excursions" that allow you to explore a variety of topics - from the invention of the crossword puzzle to the sinking of the Maine - in greater depth. These excursions employ the conventional device of offering a set of primary source documents with a brief introduction; the particular twist is that the new technology allows us to make these into multi-media explorations of the turn of the century, including 45 minutes of film, 4 and one-half hours of sound (music, speeches, and oral histories), 700 illustrations, and 5,000 pages of text. Our approach could loosely be described as social historical or "history from the bottom up" in that we emphasize the experience and the voice of ordinary Americans. But because the CD-ROM offers so much capacity, we are able to give voice as well to the rich and famous - users of the disk can, for example, hear speeches by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, and Andrew Carnegie.

In the fall of 1994 our publisher made an agreement with Apple Computers to include Who Built America? in a "bundle" of CD-ROMs that would be given to schools buying Apple's machines. We were delighted. The bundling deal with Apple meant that WBA? would find its way into thousands of schools, making these historical materials available to a broad range of people, particularly teachers and students. In January 1995, after selling 12,000 copies of WBA?, Apple told Voyager that it had received "complaints" from some school districts about the inclusion of materials on homosexuality, abortion, and birth control in the CD-ROM. (We were never able to learn the number, source, or content of these complaints.) Apple asked if we could make available a special edition of WBA? that eliminated its discussion of topics deemed not "appropriate for classroom use." We and Voyager declined. At the end of January, Apple told us they would stop selling the title.(10)

Whatever the source of the initial complaints, the issue here was clearly one of inclusiveness. The material in question, after all, was not a tract in favor of gay and abortion rights by the authors (although the authors were certainly sympathetic to these positions); rather, what was being attacked was our inclusion of primary, historical documents - and a relatively small number at that - indicating the existence of birth control, abortion, and gays at the turn of the century. One document was a 1974 oral history interview with Elizabeth Anderson who talked about having had twelve abortions in the early twentieth century. Another was a poem by Badger Clark called "The Lost Pardner," which lamented that "Al ain't here no more" and was used to make the point that homosexuality was (gasp!) not unknown among cowboys.

In early February, Voyager issued a press release about Apple's attempt at censoring the past and we rather suddenly found ourselves the center of a flurry of publicity. Although some of the initial press coverage was quite favorable (including a very sympathetic column by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News), the higher we moved up the media food chain, the more likely we were to get chewed up.(11) Moreover, the attacks quickly turned from the inclusiveness of our coverage of the past, which was not a charge that played well to more moderate audiences, to its alleged lack of respect for the rich and powerful. A long article in the Wall Street Journal, for example, used a right-wing "media consultant" (rather than a historian), who also had "close ties to Apple," to insert the charge that "this is a politically correct, left-wing version of American history." The accusation of political correctness now became an easy tag, and Newsweek devoted a full page to describing us as "Putting the 'PC' in PCs." Their reporter could not find enough material to make his point and he resorted to the device of inventing a quotation about U.S. policy toward Native Americans that seemingly proved that WBA? was "too relentlessly 'P.C.'"(12)

At this point, we decided to try to fight back with the modest means available to us. With the help of the Board of Directors of the American Social History Project, the non-profit entity under which the CD-ROM was produced, we put together a statement on what had happened and asked people to write to Michael Spindler, the president of Apple, suggesting that the company reconsider its decision. We provided his e-mail address, and also asked respondents to send copies of the letters to us. We posted the statement to some friends and acquaintances over the Internet as well as to some H-NET lists, hoping to generate a few dozen letters to Apple. The response was astonishing. Not only did people write to Spindler, but they also forwarded our letter to friends and to other electronic lists. Within five days, we had received copies of 300 e-mailed letters to Spindler. Within a few more weeks, more than 600 people had written.

Although many letters came from historians and other academics in United States, we also heard from computer programmers, engineers, geologists, lawyers, editors, librarians, students, and school teachers as well as from supporters in Japan, Germany, Norway, South Africa, England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Foreign correspondents and reporters tended to be particularly puzzled by the controversy and especially sympathetic to our position. One South African historian found it "ironic" to be complaining about censorship from that vantage point and suggested that Apple "take a leaf out of our [post-Apartheid] book and stress the importance of openness and honesty about the past."

People did not just send perfunctory, one-sentence letters of complaint; they wrote long, passionate letters talking about the dangers of censorship and about the importance of an honest accounting of the past. An American teaching in the Czech Republic, for example, noted that he was preparing to teach the first two chapters of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. "Certainly," he wrote Spindler, "you must remember Mill's vigorous and courageous defense of democracy and definition of a healthy civic body as one in which opinions of all stripes are allowed free access to the public's eyes and ears. . . . [T]he contemplated omission of Who Built America? from K-12 bundles is nothing short of censorship (despite your protest), and censorship carried forth in a manner both Mill and my Czech students would know too well." Some of the most strongly worded letters came from people who owned Apple computers and were deeply disturbed that a company that they believed was "different" was engaged in censorship. One person, who signed his letter "Disappointedly Yours," complained that "this is the kind of behavior I would expect from a monolith like IBM, not from Apple."

This outpouring of electronic letters had a large impact at Apple; we were told that the letters were discussed at the highest levels of the company. Even the initial publicity had caused Apple to back peddle slightly and insist that they were still distributing the disk with the bundle, which was literally true since they had only said that they were about to stop, and that "as a matter of course, Apple continually reviews the content of its bundles based on customer satisfaction and feedback."(13) Although we expected that this "review" would go against us, the e-mail turned the tide. In mid-April the company announced they would continue to include WBA? in the bundle sold to secondary schools.(14)

What does this episode tell us about the problems we face as historians in 1995 and the possible responses? I'd like to offer a few modest lessons and suggestions. First, we should never underestimate the power of the media to misrepresent the issues. These distortions are sometimes as much driven by laziness as malevolence. Mike Wallace has brilliantly dissected, for example, the way that reporters - without doing any reading of their own - simply repeated over and over the "inaccurate and malicious accusations" against the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit. These charges first appeared in articles by John T. Correll in Air Force Magazine, which was itself a deeply committed partisan rather than a disinterested observer. With sufficient repetition, the inaccurate claim that the original script was too sympathetic to the Japanese became a "truth" that would be repeated even in the small number of accounts that were well disposed to the Smithsonian's position.(15) Similarly, the Newsweek reporter (or editor) who described our WBA? as "Putting the 'PC' in PCs" was simply falling back on a convenient and catchy description that saved him the work of actually finding out what we had to say.

Second, although these charges are often careless or even dishonest, we still need to think carefully about their meaning and origins. The notion of "political correctness," as I have suggested, is often an overarching rubric for attacks on any history that is both inclusive and critical. The first charge is easier to rebut, since, as in the case of Apple, it places the accuser in the role of censor, not a popular position in many circles. But it is important to point up the ways that the second attack, on critical history, is also a form of censorship. It not only suppresses our right to interpret the past as we honestly see it, but also silences the voices of people from the past who did not see eye to eye with the rich and powerful. We should emphasize that we are not "inventing" these critical voices but bringing them to light. The point here is a simple one from the good old (or bad old) days of the new social history: to write history from the bottom up is not simply to include the "deluded follower of Joanna Southcott" but to also incorporate the perspective of these forgotten folks, to look at the past through the lens of the losers as well as the winners.(16)

None of this comes as much of a surprise to readers of this journal, but we need to use this conventional wisdom as part of a our responses and develop a rhetoric in which we portray ourselves (as I think we are) as the advocates of an open and inclusive view of the past against people who want to say "what's OK to say to whom, what isn't, and why." Hypocrisy is a powerful charge in American culture, and it is worth directing it where it seems particularly appropriate - against those who would use the charge of censorship as a mode of censorship. We should label such dishonesty for what it is. (Or, better yet, we might use the language of political correctness to call people like Cheney and Limbaugh "ethically challenged" or "morally different.")

Third, we should remember that academics - as articulate and credentialed members of this credentials-conscious society - have considerable resources for responding to the charges that face us. One type of response involves mobilizing our own constituency. In our own case, the Internet proved to be a strikingly effective and efficient tool for doing that. Apple was apparently affected by the enormous number of letters that they received from professional historians, and it made them question their initial position. Although Apple, because of its reputation as a "progressive" company, its large educational market, and its use of e-mail, was more vulnerable to such a mobilization than others, we have clearly not done enough to enlist our own forces in these battles. We are enormously grateful for the support that we received from fellow historians, and we have an obligation to repay that support. Indeed, I would argue that we should all be spending at least a small amount of time each week in supporting fellow historians - whether curators at the Smithsonian, organizers of the history standards, or program officers at NEH - who find themselves under attack. Historians are a pretty individualistic bunch, but the current conditions call for some old-fashioned solidarity.

Another arena in which we need to make our voices heard is in the corridors of public opinion - radio and television programs, op-ed pages, and newspaper letters pages. In some cases, we need to learn more about the rhetoric that is being used in these forums. Eric Foner did a wonderful job of debating Lynne Cheney on "Crossfire" by adopting the style of bulldog persistence that plays in such outlets; it may not be the way we want to behave at the AHA or the OAH but it works on CNN. Even more important, we (and I should make clear that I include myself in this critique) have too readily abdicated public forums to our opponents. How many of us have written letters to the editor of our local papers or called radio programs to express our views? Newt Gingrich's appointment of his crony Christina Jeffrey, an inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer herself, as the new historian for the House of Representatives, generated dozens of letters to newspapers, but few, if any, of them came from professional historians.(17) Similarly, Mike Wallace points out that the "museum community remained noticeably silent" when the Smithsonian came under attack for the Enola Gay exhibit.(18)

We also need to connect with and build support from our broader public audiences. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many academic historians shared an arrogant ivory tower contempt for the "public." In more recent years, historians who have worked with community history projects, trade union groups, museums, or film projects have realized that we need not only to give history back to popular audiences but also to listen to our audiences. In Michael Frisch's marvelous phrase, we need to learn to "share authority" over the past with our audiences.(19) Although historians have come a long way on this score, a good deal of the old elitist suspicion of "the public" persists. In the present circumstances, this fuels the assumption that we are in an "us" and "them" battle, in which "them" includes the general public. In accepting that assumption, we are often swallowing the unsubstantiated claim of conservative pundits that they represent "the public."

Without denying that there are plenty of members of the public who are offended or disturbed by a history that includes gays or presents the views of disgruntled industrial workers, historians, who are good at recognizing social and cultural differences in the past, should equally recognize that such differences exist in the present. Gay Americans, Native Americans, and working-class Americans are part of the "public" and we should make clear to such constituencies that their history is being censored or silenced. Not surprisingly, given the effort to suppress our inclusion of gay history, our appeal for support circulated particularly widely on gay lists on the Internet. Indeed, one of the most moving letters in our support came from a California undergraduate who noted that a history with gay people included would have been enormously valuable to him when he was growing up: "As a gay person I didn't see myself in any of the curriculum. None of my teachers were openly gay, none of the textbooks mentioned gay people, and the works of gay authors were deleted from my school's libraries. It wasn't until I was a sophomore in my rural Colorado high school that I learned that other gay people even existed."

More generally, there is reason to question whether Americans are as attached to the patriotic, national narrative that conservative politicians and pundits advocate on their behalf. The survey of how Americans use and understand the past that I have been undertaking with David Thelen at Indiana University suggests that Americans are deeply engaged with the past, but that engagement is more about personal and family history than about the national narrative taught in the schools. Indeed, if there is one area of the past that Americans are detached from, it is the dry recitation of famous names and dates that they remember from high school. As Wallace shows, the opponents of the Enola Gay claimed the broad support of an outraged "public," but they were themselves a rather special interest - the "air wing of . . . the military-industrial complex."(20)

In urging historians to be more active in making our case publicly, I am calling for a kind of craft unionism for historians - a more self-conscious effort to defend our craft. But we should not be under the illusion that this is sufficient. We also have an obligation, as citizens rather than historians, to connect with constituencies who are fighting against efforts to turn back the clock to the 1950s, 1920s, or 1890s. The connections are not as far fetched as they might seem since those who are advocating the censorship of the voices of ordinary people are also interested in getting those same ordinary people to "keep quiet" in the present.

It can be easily objected that these prescriptions amount to a kind of whistling in the dark. Historians, after all, mobilized quite forcefully to defend the history standards, and they still faced condemnation. Nevertheless, recovering and building our connections to our audiences - and our fellow citizens - are still worthy goals even when we face defeat. Reading some of the moving letters we received from non-historians, from our audience, was one of the best experiences I have had as a historian, just as seeing some of the ill-informed attacks on us in the media was one of the worst. Thus, if the current political crisis of social history (and of all historical work that is inclusive and critical) forces us to be more self conscious about what we are doing, to connect more with our diverse publics, and to be better citizens, then this will surely rate as one of the best of times for social historians as well as one of the worst.

Department of History Fairfax, VA 22030

ENDNOTES

1. Tony Judt, "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," History Workshop Issue #7 (Spring 1979): 66, 68.

2. Judt, 68.

3. National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience (Los Angeles, 1994). For Cheney, see Jon Wiener "History Lesson," New Republic, 212 (Jan. 2, 1995): 9-11; Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1994, Perspective Section, p. 1. This was, of course, a dishonest claim since the standards were never intended as a textbook, where one would expect a comprehensive treatment of key figures in U.S. history.

4. John Leo, "The Hijacking of American History," U.S. News & World Report 117 (Nov. 14, 1994): 36. On Otis, see Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, Illinois, 1995). On Macintosh, see Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (New York, 1985), 101-3.

5. Leo, 36; Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 7, 1994, p. 18.

6. Quoted in Jon Wiener, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," Nation 260 (April 3, 1995): 460.

7. Denver Post, Nov. 15, 1994, p. B-09 (Limbaugh); Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 6, 1994. p. 4C (Krauthammer); R. J. Lambrose, "Was Enola Gay?" Radical History Review Issue #62 (Spring 1995): 272 (Gingrich); Leo, 72 (AHA).

8. Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, Officially Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (New York, 1993), viii.

9. CD-ROM: Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Josh Brown (visual editor), Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (New York, 1993); book: American Social History Project, Who Built America? volume 2 (New York, 1992). The original text was written by: Joshua Freeman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Stephen Brier, David Bensman, Susan Porter Benson, David Brundage, Bret Eynon, Bruce Levine, Bryan Palmer, Joshua Brown (visual editor), Roy Rosenzweig (consulting editor).

10. The quote is from an Apple Press Release from ca. Feb. 12, 1995. It is important to note that we had no direct dealings with Apple and our information came second-hand from Voyager, our publisher. Voyager initially attempted to reach a compromise with Apple; in particular, Voyager suggested that WBA? be dropped from the elementary school bundle, since the text, at least in reading level, was never intended for younger children.

11. Juan Gonzalez, "Apple's Big Byte out of History," Daily News, Feb. 8, 1995, p. 10.

12. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, "U.S. History on a CD-ROM Stirs Up a Storm," Wall Street Journal (Feb. 10, 1995), BI: Michael Meyer, "Putting the 'PC' in PCs." Newsweek, Feb. 20, 1995, p. 46. One of the things that saved us from a more severe hatchet job in the Wall Street Journal was that their personal technology columnist had actually spent considerable time going through our disk and had written a favorable review of it. See Walter S. Mossberg, "'Who Built America Reveals Real Potential of Electronic Learning," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 1993, B1.

13. Apple spokesperson quoted in Gonzalez.

14. Mike Langberg, "Apple Compromises on CD-ROM Dispute," San Jose Mercury, April 14, 1995. The "compromise" was dropping WBA? from the elementary school bundle, which was something Voyager had suggested from the outset.

15. Mike Wallace, "The Battle of the Enola Gay," in the forthcoming collection of Wallace's essays tentatively titled Mickey Mouse History (Temple University Press, 1996). A shorter version of Wallace's essay appeared in the Radical Historians Newsletter (May 1995).

16. The quote, of course, is from E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 12.

17. I located 51 letters to the editor on Jeffrey's case; none seemed to be from professional historians. But Daniel T. Rodgers did weigh in with a thoughtful op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times of January 15, 1995: "The Culture Wars; A House Historian Who Was Anything But," p. M2.

18. Wallace, "Battle".

19. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, 1990).

20. Wallace, "Battle".