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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
About Brainstorm
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Recent Posts
For Millennials, College and Learning Are Not the Same | Comment [19]
The War on Drugs From Left to Right | Comment [114]
Dropout Rates, Arts and Humanities, Graduation Numbers | Comment [23]
Another Problem With Texting | Comment [29]
Books, Libraries, Kids | Comment [4]
Featured Articles By the Author
Most-Famous Americans
Here’s a story in USA Today last week on yet another survey of U.S. history knowledge on the part of students. (Other surveys are here [scroll down to “Losing Our Memory”] and here.) Researchers asked 2,000 high school juniors and seniors across the country to name “the most famous Americans in history” — excluding U.S. presidents. Tabulating the results, researchers came up with this ranking:
1. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhart
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein
Traditionalists will wince at this list, and it’s hard not to agree wtih KC Johnson here that the placement of Amelia Earhart and Harriet Tubman above Alexander Hamilton — or, we might add, Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, John Marshall, John D. Rockefeller, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . — is a regrettable sign.
The question did ask for “most famous,” though, not most important. That any pre-1990s figures made it onto the list may be cause for at least some relief, even though the selections indicate just how far out of the way current social-studies curricula go in emphasizing women and African-Americans.
On that issue, though, the researchers haven’t a whisper of criticism. In fact, they’re happy with it. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg speaks of “a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights.” He proceeds to say that Oprah Winfrey enjoys “a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin” — a “fantastical” assertion, Johnson notes, and if it’s true it doesn’t seem to bother Wineburg a bit.
Another voice in the USA Today story is Dennis Denenberg, author of 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet, who also doesn’t mind the orientation of the list. “The cold war is over and gone. The civil rights movement is ongoing.”
What to say, except that for an educator to consign so easily a historical reality of the scope of the cold war to an irrelevance for young people is beyond slack. It’s irresponsible, and a betrayal of the historian’s duty. If the kids listen, no wonder they end up knowing so little, and thinking that they don’t need to know any more.
Posted at 07:18:42 PM on February 9, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Gosh, I certainly hope that in Prof. Bauerlein’s scholarly work his researches don’t start and end with a USA Today article. I would refer interested readers to the full article in the forthcoming Journal of American History (March 2008).
— Sam Wineburg · Feb 9, 08:19 PM · #
I shall post a follow-up when the full article comes out. Right now, all we have is the news report, plus the quotations from researchers which speak for themselves.
— Mark Bauerlein · Feb 10, 07:25 AM · #
Had the same question been asked in the 1920s, I’d bet that the top ten would have included people like Babe Ruth and Al Capone. Would the historians of the day be at fault for that result, too?
— Martha Robinson · Feb 10, 07:45 AM · #
Everyone knows that Simon from American Idol is the most famous American of all. He’s named after that other famous American, Simon Bolivar.
— Lion-O · Feb 10, 02:53 PM · #
No doubt this historical amnesia is the result of too many professors whose scholarship is overly specialized, who write about a single year in one nation’s history, a single city in that nation, a single race riot in that city. Such professors, who teach English but write history, who are hired to teach literature but instead fixate on race, directly cause students to forget the real stars of the past — Buffalo Bill, Israel Barksy, Annie Oakley, and Al Jolson.
Kids these days need to put away their digital video games and their iP3 players and their cassette decks and their virtual reality doodads and spend more time in the library.
— Samuel Tonsure · Feb 10, 03:01 PM · #
What is so interesting about some of these comments is their inability to grasp the few details in an otherwise short USA TODAY story. Even in its mangled form, the story notes the remarkable overlap between teenagers’ and adults’ responses. If today’s schools are the culprit, help me understand the similarities in results among adults age 45 and above? Even among adults 65 and over, King, Parks, Tubman and Winfrey make it into the top ten. Let’s do a little math: these folks have been out of school for some time? But, gosh, never miss a chance to heap scorn on our nation’s schools, even when the data suggest that what’s going on is much larger than schools and textbooks.
What seems to rankle Prof. Bauerlain most is the “fantastic” comparison between Franklin, a self-made man who picked himself up from modest means and distinguished himself in venues too many to count, and Oprah Winfrey, someone who started with nothing and is today America’s richest self-made woman, whose commitment to philanthropy, public service to help the poor, the abused, and the downtrodden in this country and abroad would make even Professor Bauerlain blush were he able to get beyond the narrow image of Winfrey as TV host. Let’s do a thought experiment. If we could conjure Franklin’s ghost and ask him with whom he might feel the greatest kinship – a man who traded on his daddy’s wealth and oil money all the way to the White House or a self-made woman who not only speaks about but embodies civic virtue and public philanthropy – what do you think he might say? I know where I’d place my bet.
— Sam Wineburg · Feb 10, 08:49 PM · #
“Let’s conduct a thought experiment,” says Sam Wineburg, and then suggests we “conjure [Benjamin] Franklin’s ghost” and ask him “with whom he might feel the greatest kinship,” George W. Bush or Oprah Winfrey. (Note to S.W.: a comparison between two asks for greater, not greatest.) By what stretch of the imagination is that old canard, “If A Certain Famous Person were alive, he’d agree with me,” transformed into an “experiment”? Maybe we should start fearing for the future of science.
— SlowBadHands · Feb 11, 10:04 AM · #
One of the critical points here is that Wineburg and others were interviewed for the USA Today article whereas they are the authors of the article that will appear soon in the Journal of American History. One of Wiineburg’s main arguments is that history needs context and we only have surface context for the USA Today article as a preview and should view it as such.
Historical memory and reverence for historical and current figures is an interesting phenomenon to study and leads to much debate, sometimes heated. Wineburg’s historical analogy traveling across time was simply an attempt to cross some cultural patterns and to go beyond the surface reading of “the leaders” will always identify with “the leaders” in another time with his Franklin analogy. Harry Truman wouldn’t identify with either one given that he went home to live with his mother-in-law when he had to leave the White House. But there are personality traits and features to more closely examine to also better understand why people view history in the various ways that they do.
More importantly, this is a good tool to examine how people understand history and themselves. This is quite different from the “greatest presidents” polls conducted among scholars for decades now. History belongs to the people, not just those who research it but also those who read it and think about it in quite diverse ways. We can all learn something here.
— Kelly Woestman · Feb 11, 11:02 AM · #
Can’t we just agree that every humanities professor left of Bauerline is destroying the historical sensibility of the American nation? Is that too much to ask? Jeez.
— Samuel Tonsure · Feb 11, 02:47 PM · #
I just read a news item which references a survey done of British school kids who apparently believe that Winston Churchill was a myth.
www.civilwarmemory.typepad.com
— Kevin Levin · Feb 11, 05:06 PM · #
Bauerlein makes an excellent point. Even the information we have from the article and the researchers at this point indicate that something is very wrong. That any educated, rational person – let alone a university professor – could equate Oprah Winfrey’s fame or accomplishments with those of Franklin’s is disturbing indeed. Students are being taught what to think, not HOW to think.
One example of many I could cite is the way in which minority college students often carry with them a mentality of victimhood and belief that they have mountains to overcome regarding “institutional racism” in American society today. These kids either have no idea what their parents or grandparents had to deal with, or choose not to listen. The reality is that the civil rights movement begun in the 1960s largely achieved its goals, and those who insist on continuing to protest the “oppression” of women, minorities and gays in our society generally do so for their own benefit – not that of the people about whom they supposedly care so much. Truly horrific, even genocidal behavior in other parts of the world is frequently ignored in the service of these educators’ agendas.
Finally, the inexplicable worship – not just by educated youth, but by a large segment of our voting populace – of a man who essentially speaks in grand generalities and gives speeches of awe-inspiring vapidity (Barack Obama) is indicative of misplaced priorities and magical thinking. Hardly surprising considering the hermetically sealed isolation chambers so many of today’s tenured professors inhabit.
— Mark Koenig · Feb 11, 10:01 PM · #