1. I would like to thank David Courtwright for inviting me to contribute to this issue and for his wonderfully insightful editing. I am also grateful to Donald Critchlow and everyone else who astutely commented on my paper at the enjoyable “Morality and Politics” conference hosted by the Arizona State University department of history. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s famous question, written in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, specifically addressed the intermingling of northern and western Europeans in the eighteenth-century United States. Sam Tanenhaus recently reformulated this question in relation to the latest front in the curriculum wars, the revision of state history standards conducted by the conservative Texas Board of Education. Tanenhaus, “Identity Politics Leans Right,” New York Times, 21 March 2010, “Week in Review,” 1–2. My conceptualization of a “normative America” is indebted to historian Edward A. Purcell Jr.’s invaluable study of how mid-twentieth-century intellectual debates were shaped by attempts to come to terms with American democratic norms, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1973). James Davison Hunter’s account of the culture wars, though more sociological than historical, remains the standard: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), 174. The Thompson and Lippmann quotes are found in Zimmerman’s, JonathanWhose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 9Google Scholar, 2.

2. Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen exhaustively analyzes the intellectual history of how Americans have sought to come to grips with modernity, through reading Nietzsche, who made famous the “God is dead” utterance. American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, 2012). Laats, Adam, Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars (New York, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Courtwright, David, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Bennett is quoted in Peter Schrag, “The New School Wars: How Outcome-Based Education Blew Up,” American Prospect, 1 December 1994. Carol Belt, the Christian Right pamphleteer, is quoted in Detwiler, Fritz, Standing on the Premises of God: The Christian Right’s Fight to Redefine America’s Public Schools (New York, 1999), 218Google Scholar. Belt authored the pamphlet “Educational Restructuring of America—Education or Indoctrination,” which was circulated among Christian right activists in the 1990s.

5. Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal, 20 October 1994, A22, A26–A27. The National History Standards were divided into three parts: U.S., World, and pre-fourth grade. Cheney focused her attention on the U.S. Standards: National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience (Los Angeles, 1994). The standard professional historian response to conservative criticism is Nash, Gary B., Crabtree, Charlotte, and Dunn, Ross E., History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 2000)Google Scholar. The best historical overview, though written from an insider vantage point, is Symcox, Linda, Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

6. Cheney retrospectively contended that she turned against the Standards because she was blindsided. More likely, since she resigned as chair of the NEH soon after Clinton took office, she felt fewer constraints in attacking them in order to curry favor with the rising 1994 Republican majority, led by Gingrich, Newt. Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense—and What We Can Do About It (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

7. Finn, Chester, “The Schools,” in What to Do About... A Collection of Essays from “Commentary” Magazine, ed. Kozodoy, Neal (New York, 1995), 118.Google Scholar

8. For a broad history of the relationship between schooling and class, see Nasaw, David, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar. Katz, Michael, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. McGreevy, John, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York, 2003).Google Scholar

9. The standard history of the progressive education movement remains Cremin, Lawrence, The Transformation of the American School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York, 1961)Google Scholar. For more on John Dewey as a progressive educator, and how that role related to him being one of the founders of philosophical pragmatism, see Westbrook, Robert B., John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991)Google Scholar. Although never to the degree that his conservative detractors believed, John Dewey’s educational philosophy—the bedrock of progressive educational thought—was indeed tied to an explicitly liberal, even radical, political agenda. See Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, 1916). This book represents Dewey’s educational philosophy at its most fully developed. The attack on Rugg’s books is detailed in Zimmerman, Whose America? 66–78. For a look at conservative educational vigilantism in the context of the Cold War and a broader analysis of the conservative conflation of progressive education with communism, see Hartman, Andrew, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York, 2008), esp. chap. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. For a fantastic analysis of the conservative response to Engel, see Christopher Hickman, “The Most Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court and Its Critics in the Warren Court Era” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2010), chap. 3. The separation of church and state was more abstract than real in American life prior to the 1960s because the establishment clause was not enforced at the state level, which is made clear in Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar. On how classroom practices often contrasted with progressive theory, see Cuban, Larry, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. For changes to sex education, see Moran, Jeffrey, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar. On MACOS, and the conservative backlash it spawned, see Evans, Ronald W., The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York, 2004), chap. 6.Google Scholar

11. National Education Association Records, Special Collections Research Center, Gelman Library (hereafter NEA Archives), box 2128, folder 3: “Affirmative Action Notebook” by Dr. Shirley McCune Zimmerman, Whose America? 115–19. The literature on Black, Chicano, Ethnic, and Women’s Studies is small but growing: Rojas, Fabio, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williamson, Joy Ann, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975 (Urbana, 2003)Google Scholar; Muñoz, Carlos Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, revised and expanded edition (London, 2007)Google Scholar: Biondi, Martha, “Student Protest, ‘Law and Order,’ and the Origins of African-American Studies in California,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, ed. Sinha, Manisha and Eschen, Penny Von (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. Books authored by influential multicultural theorist James Banks were assigned in teachers colleges nationwide. A small sample: Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies (New York, 1975); Multiethnic Education: Theory and Practice (Boston, 1981); “New York Report on Multicultural Textbooks,” in Historic Documents of 1991 (Washington, D.C., 1992), 331–48.

12. Zimmerman, Whose America? 128–29. Zimmerman’s account of how multicultural inclusion did not challenge the basic conservatism of textbooks is in accord with Loewen, James, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; “Directive on Religion in Public Schools,” in Historic Documents of 1995 (Washington, D.C., 1996), 646–52.

13. For a detailed narrative on how the Anaheim anti–sex education struggle was important to the renewal of the Christian Right, see Martin, William, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996), 102–16Google Scholar. See also Moran, Teaching Sex. Moran details the history of SIECUS and the Anaheim sex education curriculum in chap. 6, “Fighting the Sexual Revolution.”

14. The first Hargis quote is found in Moran, Teaching Sex, 183. For the other Hargis quotes: the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence (hereafter Wilcox Collection), Billy James Hargis Folder 3: Letters, 1967–69.

15. The West Virginian textbook controversy recently gained renewed attention thanks to Trey Key’s award-winning radio documentary, “The Great Textbook War,” West Virginia Public Radio (31 October 2009). The “shot heard” and Marshner quotes are from the broadcast transcript. For more, see Mason, Carol, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy (Ithaca, 2009)Google Scholar; Denman, William H., “‘Them Dirty, Filthy Books’: The Textbook War in West Virginia,” in Free Speech Yearbook 1976, ed. Phipher, Greg (Falls Church, Va., 1976), 42–50Google Scholar; and Page, Ann L. and Clelland, Donald A., “The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy: A Study of the Politics of Life Style Concern,” Social Forces 57, no. 1 (September 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Most of these quotes can be found in “The Great Textbook War” radio transcripts. The Jack Maurice quote is found in the NEA Archives, box 2162, folder 1. The pamphlet passage is from Martin, With God on Our Side, 122.

17. NEA Archives, box 2161, folders 4–8: “Inquiry Report: Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict” (Washington, D.C.: NEA Teacher Rights Division, 1975). The national commentator was Russell Gibbons, writing in Commonweal, in Denman, “‘Them Dirty, Filthy Books,’” 44.

18. For a general history of how the family became the foremost issue of the Christian Right in the 1970s, see Flippen, J. Brooks, Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (Athens, Ga., 2011)Google Scholar; Ribuffo, Leo P., “Family Policy Past As Prologue: Jimmy Carter, the White House Conference on Families, and the Mobilization of the New Christian Right,” Review of Policy Research 23, no. 2 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilcox Collection, Mel and Norma Gabler, folder 2. The Bell quote is found in Zimmerman, Whose America? 180–81.

19. Most historians who study the modern Christian Right discuss how religious conservatives framed their educational positions against “secular humanism.” For example, Williams, Daniel K., God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, dedicates a subsection of chap. 7 on the “Culture Wars in the Carter Years” to “Concerns about ‘Secular Humanism’ in Education,” 134–37. For how the writings of Schaeffer, Rushdoony, and LaHaye influenced grassroots activists in their curriculum battles during the 1980s and 1990s, see Detwiller, Standing on the Premises of God, esp. chap. 8.

20. LaHaye, Tim, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children (Old Tappan, N.J., 1983), 38Google Scholar, 29, 71. This was the third book in a three-part “Battle” series that LaHaye wrote, which also included The Battle for the Mind and The Battle for the Family. Robertson and Swaggart, who uttered their concerns about secular humanist schools in 1984 and 1985, respectively, are quoted in Hunter, Culture Wars, 202–3.

21. Richard John Neuhaus, “Introduction,” Hand, Brevard, American Education on Trial: Is Secular Humanism a Religion? (Washington, D.C., 1987)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 27.Google Scholar

22. For a lucid interpretation of the trends in jurisprudence that led to the Seeger decision, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, chaps. 10 and 11.

23. For a discussion of the Tennessee case and of Judge Hand’s ruling, see the preface to “Curriculum Group on Religion in Schools,” Historic Documents of 1987 (Washington, D.C., 1988). Daniel Rodgers puts Hand’s originalism in the broader context of ahistorical thinking that has marked American social thought since the 1970s, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 235–37.

24. Amy J. Binder narrates the Christian Right’s evolving strategies to fight against evolution education, interestingly, alongside her analysis of Afrocentric efforts to reshape the curriculum: Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton, 2002). For details on Edwards v. Aguillard, see the preface to “Federal District Court on Intelligent Design,” Historic Documents of 2005, (Washington, D.C., 2006); Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Washington, D.C., 1998), viii, 4, 8; Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., 1999).

25. The best historical analysis of the problem of religion in America’s schools is Fraser, James, Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. Fraser addresses the paradox of how conservative Christians adopted the “rights” language of multicultural educators in making the case that the teaching of secular humanism as a religion abridged their rights as Christians. Hand, American Education on Trial, 7.

26. Reed is cited in Detwiller, Standing on the Premises of God, 220. Binder covers the Vista school board history in depth, Contentious Curricula, 161–69. The debate over evolution continues, of course. In the late 1990s, a conservative majority on the Kansas school board controversially removed evolution from its state standards. In 2005, a local Pennsylvania school board voted to have a statement supporting intelligent design read to all students. In response, President George W. Bush declared that both evolution and intelligent design “ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” Judge John E. Jones found the Pennsylvania rule unconstitutional in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Jones argued that “the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.” “Federal District Court on Intelligent Design,” Historic Documents of 2005.

27. Boyer, Ernest L., High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Goodlad, John I., A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. Boyer and Goodlad’s books were all the rage in teachers colleges, yet their modest Deweyan proposals to better integrate school and community hardly seem radical in comparison to the critical pedagogues who were also beginning to gain influence, especially Paulo Freire and his acolytes Henry Giroux and Michael Apple. Freire, , Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. The Christian day-school movement got its start in the South as a form of resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. Whether the movement persisted as such is a matter of debate. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration’s IRS challenged the tax-exempt status of this growing chain of schools. What the federal government viewed as its attempt to close a loophole that allowed some whites to evade court-ordered desegregation, the Christian Right saw as a war against religious expression. Reese, William J., History, Education, and the Schools (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, views the creation of the schools through the lens of religion. Crespino, Joseph, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, understands Christian day schools as segregation by other means. Of course, the two arguments are not mutually exclusive. For a long history of homeschooling, as well as for recent conservative growth in homeschooling, see Gaither, Milton, Homeschool: An American History (New York, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Kristol, Irving, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1995), 43–49Google Scholar. The best book on the history of neoconservatism to date is Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 2010)Google Scholar. For a revealing biography of one of the movement’s leaders, see Jeffers, Thomas L., Norman Podhoretz: A Biography (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Finn, Chester, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, 2008), x, 150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Bennett, William J., The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (New York, 1992), 22, 52.Google Scholar

30. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform (1983). For more on the standards movement that resulted in the creation of national standards, see Symcox, Whose History? See also Evans, The Social Studies Wars.

31. Gary Nash’s involvement in the creation of the Standards, and in the 1990s battles over history curriculum more generally, is outlined in the many essays of a special edition of The History Teacher dedicated to “A Life in Public Education: Honoring Gary B. Nash,” vol. 42 (January 2009). For one of Gary Nash’s many works of social history, see Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974).

32. Finn is quoted in Symcox, Whose History? 121.

33. Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” A26. Cheney expanded on her WSJ piece in her 1995 book, Telling the Truth, 26–30. Transcript of Rush Limbaugh radio program (24 October 1994).

34. George H. W. Bush’s commencement address (4 May 1991) was published in the Michigan Daily (11 February 2010), courtesy of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. The best single collection of essays on the political correctness controversies is Berman, Paul, ed., Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

35. Livingston, James, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2009)Google Scholar. Eric Hobsbawm also relates the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class resentment against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Interview: World Distempers,” New Left Review 61 (January–February 2010): 135.

36. “Historical Summary of Public Elementary and Secondary School Statistics,” table 36, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2004 (Washington, D.C., 2004). For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between education demographics and cultural conflict, see Hartman, Education and the Cold War. William F. Buckley Jr., “Our Mission Statement,” National Review, 19 November 1955.

37. Stephanie Simon, “The Culture Wars’ New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas,” Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2009.

38. For a critical look at standardized testing and recent education reform more generally, see Hartman, Andrew, “Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders,” Jacobin (Winter 2012): 51–56.Google Scholar