Teaching Americans About Their History

Annie Applebaum writes an interesting piece in the Washington Post about the shortcomings of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. I'll be visiting this museum in a couple of weeks (Mrs. HolyCoast has the innauguration gowns of the First Ladies at the top of her "must see" list), and I think Ms. Applebaum has some interesting suggestions for "America's attic" (h/t Instapundit):

Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn't tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower. When the museum was built in 1964, this sort of thing probably wasn't necessary. But judging from a group of teenagers whom I recently heard lapse into silence when asked if they could identify Lewis and Clark, I suspect it's now very necessary indeed.

Opinion polls bear out my suspicions. According to one poll, more U.S. teenagers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. Even fewer can state the first three words of the Constitution. A San Francisco reporter once did an informal survey of teenagers watching Fourth of July fireworks in a park and found that only half could name the country from which the United States had won its independence. ("Japan or something, China," said one seventh-grader. "Somewhere out there on the other side of the world.") We're not talking about ignorance of semi-obscure facts here: We're talking about ignorance of basic information.

Given this yawning knowledge gap, the Museum of American History could perform a real service to its 3 million annual visitors just by telling them, in at least one or two permanent exhibitions, something about what actually happened. After all, museum visitors can see Mickey Mouse and his ilk any time. But many visitors, after their once-in-a-lifetime trip to Washington, won't go to another history museum again. Ever.

I'm sure chronology isn't the hottest thing in curatorial science these days, but a museum that tells a chronological story doesn't have to be full of dusty displays and dull captions. The first room of the museum of totalitarianism in Budapest opens with a bank of television sets blaring fascist propaganda on one wall and a bank of television sets blaring communist propaganda on another. Without a single written word, the dilemma of Hungary in the 1940s becomes instantly clear. Apply the same ideas to the American Revolution -- use music, pictures and, yes, George Washington's candlestick -- and it's possible to fascinate even the most video-numbed modern American. Nor are cartoon characters needed to make U.S. history "relevant" either: The language of the American Constitution is the language of the civil rights movement and the language Sen. Barack Obama used in his speech at last year's Democratic convention. An exhibition on the Civil War would naturally include Confederate flags and symbols, which are still the subject of controversy today.

None of which is to say that the museum needs to chuck out Evel Knievel's motorcycle and Judy Garland's ruby slippers or (worse) put them in a pompous exhibition called "Postwar Popular Culture." Why not stick them on the top floor and jumble them together with the "I Like Ike" buttons," Alexander Graham Bell's telephone and the first sewing machine. Let visitors wander through the nation's attic -- but with a better understanding of how the nation got to be here in the first place.

She's got some good ideas. Wouldn't it be fascinating to be able to go through a museum of American History in some sort of chronological order that would truly tell the tale of this great country, warts and all. I think millions of schoolkids (and their adult chaperones) could really benefit from something like that.

Of course, you'd have to be careful about who you have organize the exhibits. You may remember that when the Enola Gay was first set for exhibit in the Smithsonian (for the history impaired, it's the WWII B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima), some history revisionists decided to make the display all about how WWII was America's fault and the atomic bombing was just a classic case of overkill. Those guys were quickly run out of town by veteran's groups and others who love truth over political correctness, and today the bomber sits in the new branch of the Air and Space Museum (pictured here) without the America-bashing nonsense that was first proposed.

Liberal historians love to judge history by today's politically correct standards, and in so doing blame America for all the world's faults. As long as you can keep those idiots out of the Smithsonian, I think Applebaum's suggestions for the Museum of American History have a lot of merit.