State History

This article originally appeared on the AASLH website.

Free societies demand honest, open, and critical engagement with the past. When government restricts what history professionals should study or polices how historians should interpret and teach the past, it threatens the right and the duty of Americans to understand fully the nation’s history.

We all have a responsibility to engage with that history in its full complexity. Participatory democracy requires that we recognize not just the triumphs of our past, but the struggles and injustices that continue to shape the present. As historians and history organizations, we have a responsibility to work with the public to build more accurate, more complete understandings of the nation’s history. As we research, write, teach, study, and present history, we must listen to previously neglected voices and bear witness to the wrongs of our past. We must engage the public in the process of historical inquiry, critical thinking, and evidence-based analysis, showing that history has always been an ongoing process of revision.

We can grow to shape the future only by learning from both the mistakes and successes of the past, not by erasing or ignoring what is uncomfortable or inconvenient. To move forward as individuals, families, neighborhoods, states, and as a nation, we must clearly understand our ancestors in their resilience and heroism, as well as in their confusion and failings. Read more...