The nation’s museum, The Smithsonian, becomes another front in the war on truth.
But even as the social history approach remade American museums, most Americans cling to an understanding of history that prioritizes the very things the social historians criticized. According to a 2021 survey of attitudes to history, conducted by researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association, the vast majority of Americans view history fundamentally differently than historians do. History, for about 70 percent of Americans, is simply what we remember about the past, especially names, dates and other facts. It isn’t, as most professional historians believe, the interpretation of those facts that constitutes history.
“We were always trying to get people to think, ‘What is history?’” Gardner says. “The goal was to think about meaning and perspectives.”
So, there is a paradox: Americans consume and enjoy social history on a daily basis, in museums, books and documentaries, but if asked to define history, they would give an account that sounds more like the rote lessons and recitations of fact that their grandparents and great-grandparents found tedious and boring decades ago.