A Student’s Guide to U.S. History
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inflated, to live by, without egregious hypocrisy or overreach-
ing. In any event, we have, in some measure, lost our guiding
national narrative—not completely, but certainly we have lost
it as a near-universal article of faith. There is too much self-
conscious doubt, too little confidence that the nation-state
itself is as worthy of our devotion as is our subgroup. Indeed,
the rise of interest in more particularist considerations of race,
class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and so on have
had the effect of draining energy away from the national story,
rendering it either weak and indecisive—or the villain in a
thousand stories of “subaltern” oppression.
The problem is not that such stories do not deserve to be
told. Of course they do. There is always a horrific price to be
paid in consolidating a nation, and one is obliged to tell the
whole story if one is to count the cost fully. The brutal dis-
placement of Indian tribes, the horrors of chattel slavery and
post-emancipatory peonage, the grim conditions of indus-
trial labor, the ongoing tragedy of racial and religious hatred,
the hidden injuries of class—all these stories and others like
them need to be told and heard, again and again. They should
not, however, be told in a way that sentimentalizes them, by
displacing the mythic dimension of the American story onto
them, and by ignoring the pervasive existence of precisely
such horrors and worse in all human societies throughout
recorded time. History is not reducible to a simple morality
play, and it rarely obliges our moral aspirations in anything
but rough form. The crimes, cruelties, inequities, and other
misdeeds of American history are real. But they need to be