Sorry, Still No American Exceptionalism

hen Newsweek broke the story last week that the College Board had redone its controversial 2014 AP U.S. history (APUSH) framework, the headline blared: “Revised AP U.S. History Standards Will Emphasize American Exceptionalism.” That headline was quickly echoed across the web, with Slate promising an APUSH course “Juiced Up With More ‘American Exceptionalism,’” New York Magazine following suit, and Think Progress decrying the College Board’s supposed “cave” to conservative pressure.

A more accurate headline would have been, “College Board Inserts Meaningless Mention of American Exceptionalism to Shut Conservatives Up: Liberals Go Nuts.”

Early coverage of the renewed APUSH controversy has been shallow. Nearly every story hypes Ben Carson’s (obviously non-literal) claim that students who finish APUSH will be “ready to sign up for ISIS.” Very few stories mention the thoughtful critique of the 2014 APUSH framework signed by over 120 historians and teachers. Virtually none of the coverage so far has explored the revised framework to see if the supposed new emphasis on American exceptionalism actually corresponds to added content. It does not. While the College Board has thrown in a mention of American exceptionalism to placate critics, the framework itself continues to focus on globalism, culture-mixing, gender identity, migration, environmentalism, and such. America’s sense of principled mission, its unique blending of religious and democratic commitment, its characteristic emphasis on local government, the high cultural esteem in which economic enterprise is held, and America’s distinctive respect for individual liberty, are neither stressed nor contrasted with other countries to highlight the American difference.

I’m going to fill out this point in a moment, but first I want to share a response to the revised APUSH framework I received from one of the signatories of the scholars’ statement protesting the 2014 framework.

Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, is the author, with Michael Allen, of A Patriot’s History of the United States (and more recently, a two-volume history of the modern world). A Patriot’s History of the United States is by no means a simplistic “my country right or wrong” tract. It is instead a thoughtful history, acknowledging American flaws, yet written to counter what Schweikart and Allen believe to be the unbalanced negativism of most U.S. history textbooks. (Here are reviews from NR and The Wall Street Journal.) Schweikart sent me an extended critique of the just-released APUSH revisions (which he calls “non-revisons”), and summed up his take in the following two paragraphs:

“The main gist of [the scholars’ statement of protest against the 2014 APUSH framework] was that there was no recognition of American Exceptionalism in the original exam, and then, at a more micro level, hundreds of specific concerns about the lack of economic, military, technological history and traditional biography. As the Who used to sing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” To appreciate and convey American Exceptionalism, it would help to understand what it is. Michael Allen, then Dave Dougherty and I undertook this in our Patriot’s History of the United States and both volumes of Patriot’s History of the Modern World, to wit, American Exceptionalism rests on four pillars: 1) a Christian, mostly Protestant religious heritage; 2) a heritage of common law; 3) a free market; and 4) private property with titles and deeds. While #3 did not come along arguably until the nation was well-founded, the other three were at work in American colonial history as nowhere else in the world, not even England.”

“There is no indication that the AP group understands—much less endorses—these pillars. The new iteration has some tip of the hat to a free economy, yet it (like everything else here) is entirely focused on “forces” and “trends” while completely ignoring the role of individual entrepreneurs and inventors. It only gets worse when the AP group gets to military history, where apparently wars “are fought” without soldiers, battles, heroes, or generals. There is not a single military leader, not a single Civil War or WWII battle mentioned (save D-Day). As I frequently tell classes, the battle of Antietam did more to shape American history than all the episodes of “I Love Lucy” put together. Yet the sound from AP? Crickets.”

With the minor proviso that the revised framework does give a quick nod to George Washington as a military leader, Schweikart is on point here.

Despite the addition of a theme on American national identity (where the College Board inserts a passing reference to American exceptionalism), there is little-to-no significant new content to bear out this theme. As before, the framework emphasizes culture mixing, migration, and global perspectives, rather than the distinctive features of American identity.

The 2014 APUSH framework, for example, was notorious for repeatedly contrasting the mixed racial unions of the Spanish colonies with the “rigid racial hierarchy” of the English colonies. That controversial cultural comparison is gone now, although a de-sexualized reference to Spanish colonial culture-mixing remains. Yet the more traditional and significant comparison between the democratic, localist, and individualist traditions of the British colonies, on the one hand, and Spanish colonial authoritarianism, on the other, is omitted.

As Schweikart points out, the revised framework neglects the influence of English common law, and the ways in which common law, with its peculiar accommodation to individual initiative and local variation, influenced the American character. I’ve already shown how reluctant the College Board is to highlight the overwhelming influence of European culture on the colonial experience. The same is true of early America’s distinctively British heritage.

The traditional trinity for American students was Western Civilization, English history, and American history. Yet the APUSH framework remains reluctant to acknowledge the distinctive character, much less the achievements, of either Western, British, or American culture. A contrived theme on American national identity has been added as a way of placating critics. But in actual content, the framework remains focused on globalism, culture-mixing, and migration. And as Schweikart points out, the concerns voiced in the scholars’ statement about the demotion of military and diplomatic history continue to go unaddressed. The focus remains on globalism, gender, migration, environmentalism, and various group identities. As far as I can tell, the framework doesn’t even mention the War of 1812, let alone any of its battles. That doesn’t mean students will never hear about the War of 1812, but it does indicate the College Board’s priorities. Religion is not entirely absent from the framework, but it certainly doesn’t get the constant emphasis that fashionable topics like migration and group identity receive.

The most significant changes to the APUSH framework are the removal of controversial phrases, along with a general paring down of the content. The College Board is obviously straining to avoid controversy. As a result, the framework is now even thinner and more fragmentary than before. The College Board has kept the overall bias of the controversial 2014 edition, and simply removed the loudest proclamations of what that bias was.

In a vacuum, this paring back of content might make for a bit more teacher flexibility. Unfortunately, textbooks for AP U.S. history already run the gambit from liberal Democratic to downright leftist. And now that the textbooks have all been conformed to the controversial 2014 framework, they’re even more left-leaning than they already were. So what will change as a result of the new framework? Essentially, nothing.

All that’s really happened is the excision of the most controversial language. The basic approach is still the same. So there really is virtually nothing for the textbooks to revise.

In short, the changes to the College Board’s APUSH framework are largely cosmetic. As I’ve been saying for some time, the only way to restore meaningful choice to AP testing is to create a competitive alternative to the College Board. Let’s have some of the scholars who signed the statement of protest against the College Board’s APUSH framework advising a company that takes a truly different approach to U.S. history. Then let’s do the same for other AP topics like European history, U.S. Government and Politics, and World History. At that point, folks who can barely stand to hear the phrase “American exceptionalism” would truly have something to scream about—while the rest of us would have reason to smile.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421952/sorry-still-no-american-exceptionalism-apush-stanley-kurtz

1) a Christian, mostly Protestant religious heritage; 2) a heritage of common law; 3) a free market; and 4) private property with titles and deeds. While #3 did not come along arguably until the nation was well-founded, the other three were at work in American colonial history as nowhere else in the world, not even England.”

Those 4 things are hardly unique to the United States. The UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have them. Most Germanic and Scandinavian nations have 1, 3 and 4 (but not 2; they’re civil law). So that’s hardly exceptional. And while we don’t want AP history to sound like something written by Bill Ayres, we don’t want it to be Soviet-style “history” that omits all the bad stuff and only includes the good.

No. None of these countries had a truly "Protestant" religion from their origin (Anglicanism is not really a protesting religion---it is Catholicism accomodating Henry's divorce.) So England, Canada, Australia, and NZ don't fit. Yes, Scandinavian countries do---but as you correctly point out, they don't have common law.

England did NOT have "common law" in terms of true 'bottom-up' governance until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So, in fact, we are the only nation to have all four of these from the outset. And if you'd read "A Patriot's History of the United States," you'd know that the last part of your comment isn't relevant.

David Coleman is the president of the College Board
https://www.collegeboard.org/about/leadership/david-coleman

Coleman, 42, was an architect of the Common Core State Standards which to date have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. He is a Founding Partner of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit organization devoted to the successful implementation of the Standards, where he leads the organization’s work with teachers and policymakers to achieve the promise of the Common Core to improve education.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120524064147/http://press.collegeboard.org/releases/2012/college-board-names-david-coleman-new-president

Now, Coleman is in charge of the most important test score a student can receive. As president of the College Board, a national education company, he is redesigning the SAT, the standardized test taken by many high school seniors as a part of the college application process. He is also expanding the Advanced Placement program, which offers college-level classes and tests for high school students.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/david-coleman-common-core-sat_n_3818107.html

New information on Common Core “alignment” by the ACT, SAT, and even GED exams raises questions about the impact Common Core will have on private and homeschooled students and their ability to “opt out” of the federally incentivized standards if they want to apply for college.

David Coleman, new head of the College Board—which administers the SAT—said in an interview with Education Week that one of his top priorities is to align the SAT with the new standards. “The Common Core provides substantial opportunity to make the SAT even more reflective of what higher education wants.”
http://dailysignal.com/2013/06/23/common-cores-nationalizing-tentacles-sat-act-and-ged-alignment/

Referred to as ‘Common Core lead standards authors’ by the Council of Chief State School Officers, David Coleman and Jason Zimba are just two in a long list of Common Core creators whose academic roots are with the education-for-a-revolution machine borne by Annenberg Institute, Carnegie Corporation, Bill Gates, et al.
http://eagnews.org/common-core-architect-david-colemans-history-with-the-ayers-and-obama-led-chicago-annenberg-challenge/

Amnesty and Common Core: Two Sides of the Same Coin – Part I
“economic justice goals of Common Core as presented by David Coleman”
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3296550/posts

No. None of these countries had a truly “Protestant” religion from their origin (Anglicanism is not really a protesting religion-—it is Catholicism accomodating Henry’s divorce.)

I’m not a Protestant. So for me, the whole “Protestant” thing doesn’t really matter, anyhow.

Actually, it’s huge and is only equalled by common law. The reason is latitudinarianism, bottom-up governing, which is one of the main reasons Canada did not have the same reactions to British policies. It completely infused the decentralized federalist structure.

IMHO
The Theme Is Freedom:
Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition
by M. Stanton Evans.
is an excellent dissertation on American conservatism. The distinctive feature of the book, in my takeaway, is how it asserts that Catholic doctrine is loaded with support for liberty. The difficulty, Evans {RIP :( ] asserted, is not in finding such sources but deciding which ones not to use.
I’m not Catholic, and I went to ~~public~~ government school. Reading Theme made me sense that there was some serious omitting going on, even back in the 1950s, in the teaching of US history. AntiCatholic, in this case . . .
I had a Civics course back then, in which the teacher gave a homework assignment which had the punchline that the teacher critiqued my response by asserting that “we like to use ‘society’ as a synonym for government.” I was utterly unconvinced, and it turns out that Thomas Paine put paid to that “argument” in 1776:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil;
As I was standing up in that class, I would have loved to have been able to recite that - the opening paragraph + of Common Sense.
IMHO conservatives should aggressively use the term “society” in its proper meaning; it fills a real need. For example I cringe when people say, “the market decided” this or that. No, society decided that, thru the mechanism of the market.

Did you read my comments in the NRO article? They only excerpted a few of them. If you want a blow-by-blow attack on the AP standards, see my detailed comments here; https://www.nas.org/articles/2015_apush_misses_the_reasons_america_is_exceptional

Wow, Larry, that’s a great article. Great specifics which were carefully avoided by the standards.
Just as an overview argument, “American Exceptionalism is, IMHO, merely the fact that the American Great Experiment was - an experiment. It had to deliver “the blessings of liberty” or be a failure. To say that America is not exceptional is to say that it is a failure.
But to say that America is a failure flies in the face of the historic American Immigration phenomenon. People do leave America - but people want to come. Yes, land ownership is more available here - in places. But even that is an artifact of the “domestic tranquility” established here. And yet we see anti conservative activism subverting tranquility, a government working against its own authority.

Part of Zero's plan is to do what you said, make this country do despoiled that people want to leave (record number of people renouncing citizenship).

Yeah - and even at that, of course, it is a relative trickle.

On land ownership WITH WRITTEN TITLES AND DEEDS we were not alone (most of Europe had this) but unlike all others we had available land. Every new restriction Zero places on the country is designed to reduce land and home ownership.

Your emphasis on written titles and deeds puts me in mind of the guy (de Sota?) who wrote a few years back about the squatters in a Peruvian city, I think - who laid heavy emphasis on the value of clear titles in the establishment of a middle class and entrepreneurship.
I also think of the American frontier institution which I had never even dreamt of until I read Boorstin’s The Americans - the National Experience. The "claim club,” as I (now vaguely) recall it. The idea of the claim club was that people who would stake claims in a given locale would not find it at all practical to leave them unattended to go register their claims at some central location. Instead, the claim club was a mechanism for localizing the recognition of claims - you showed up and staked your claim, and you basically swore allegiance to the claims of everyone else in the community - and in exchange, the community would help you enforce your claim.
Boorstin said that if you went to the central registry and filed a claim, and then showed up and tried to evict someone who had already physically staked out that land and joined the claim club, you would be out of luck trying to make the paper in the registry stick. Not only would you be physically forced out if you tried, you would also lose in court because the judge in your case would himself be a member of a claim club.
Boorstin also had a kind word for vigilantes, making the point that there were times and places for them, and that they often, as it were, went by Robert’s Rules of Order even though they were organized ad hoc. He told of a murderer who had a one-day trial at their hands, pointing out that the jurors were giving up what to them was important, valuable time in order to see justice done. Far from summary executions, in his telling.
Boorstin’s The Americans trilogy was interesting in another sense - in being a history without wars. He simply talks about people. A real “people’s history,” not the Zinn kind.
Thank you so much for your yeoman’s work addressing the AP test for the sake of future generations. It really is a scandal how the marxists have just taken over the culture by taking over, say rather preventing, the teaching of history.

Exactly right on De Soto ("The Mystery of Capital"). Common law and land ownership with written titles and deeds work together ONLY in America in this way:

When the Northwest Territories (IN, MI, OH, IL, WI) were opened to settlement in 1785, they were supposed to be surveyed, then land parcels sold. Except settlers quickly went way past the surveys to establish their own land, farms, even towns. All other nations would have sent gubment troops to evict the squatters, but under common law, the people know what's best. So the Articles of Confederation Congress developed "preemption" better known as squatter's rights. You live there for seven years, develop the land, take a "deed" into a gubment office with your own drawing of your land lines, they certify it. It's legal. NO ONE else has done this. Under European civil law, Sharia law, or any far eastern law I know of, the gument tells the people what to do.

Now, in a book/film series called "The Commanding Heights" by Daniel Yergin, De Soto's idea is followed up in Africa, and things didn't work out as well because (not their words, but mine) absence of COMMON LAW. They couldn't sort out the original land holders (you never can!). So even though they knew his idea worked, they wouldn't cut the Gordian Knot and just say, "It starts now. YOU own this." It's very unjust to some of the original people, but it quickly sorts out.

They couldn't sort out the original land holders (you never can!). So even though they knew his idea worked, they wouldn't cut the Gordian Knot and just say, "It starts now. YOU own this." It's very unjust to some of the original people, but it quickly sorts out.

Very interesting, Professor!
That “you never can!” principle applies, then, to the indigenous, “native American” tribes. The European immigrants who colonized America and made the USA out of it imposed the principle of land ownership and titles - and, in the process, aced out the indigenous tribes who didn’t even have the concept. Who didn’t even have the concept, let alone any ownership records.
People want to claim that the US took the Southwest from Mexico, but in reality Mexico’s title wasn’t one that the indigenous tribes recognized - and the Mexican government’s writ didn’t run in the lands that the US (ahem) "bought” from Mexico. The European “Americans” were just more effective and resourceful “squatters” from that perspective.
Do I pass?
:-)

Part of the availability of land is precisely the fact that we do not have ownership “in fee tail” making land titles unsalable.

Well, not really. I have bought and sold pieces of land.

??
I’m reluctant to assume that you don’t understand me, but it’s certain that we don’t both understand each other.
You are able to buy land from someone, only if he has the right to sell it to you. If the owner of the land held it in fee tail, he would not have the right to sell it to you, and your lawyer would warn you against paying the price of the property for a flawed deed which wouldn’t stand up in court. IMHO, and IANAL, it would be the same as if you bought real estate from a married man, and didn’t get his wife’s signature on the bill of sale. In such case when the man who sold it to you dies, his wife inherits “your” property from her late husband - and you are on the outside looking in. At least that’s how it was taught to me in the one law course, the elective “Cases on Contracts,” which I took in engineering school.
It would seem that the holder of property in fee tail would have been in the same position as the man who can’t get his wife to agree to a sale of real estate - his eldest son would inherit “your” property upon his death - and that could not be changed by the owner of property in fee tail. Lacking the ability to deliver a clear title, the owner of property in fee tail would not be able to sell his property for anything approximating its full worth - and if you bought it from him, you couldn’t sell it for full value either - because your “title” would expire with the death of the man you bought it from.
That sort of pitfall, IMHO, is what a “title search” is all about.

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