A thread on history/memory: Ppl who know little about history are more easily manipulated by historical memories designed to emotionally exploit previously held beliefs & prejudices (while those who do know it are also exploitable but to a lesser degree). https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/most-us-would-fail-u-s-citizenship-test-survey-finds-n918961

Critical "consumers" or "targets" of historical memories in our political culture are not necessarily less emotionally manipulable, but they are at least aware of the historical & contemporary role of historical memory in partisan political discourse & the goals of such memories.

In my course on the memory of the AmRev, I taught students the conflicted history of AmRev memory and spent the final 1/3 of the course on the present, with the goal that students would learn to sense when a historical memory might seem to them not only wrong but too right.

It is still important for historians to call out inaccuracies in partisan historical memories, but we should realize that the impact of doing so is limited. What we should also do is point out to non-historians how & why certain historical memories work on certain people.

Distorting the past to serve partisan political goals is an American political tradition, on both the Right & Left. Saying, "The GOP (or the Left) distorts the past" misses the point. The point is WHY are they doing it and why is their constituency receptive to it.

In the last four decades, history education in this country, especially at the primary levels, has been systematically gutted, first by being combined with geography and civics into "social studies" and then by the testing regime.

Such a scenario is relatively new in the history of American education & we're clearly seeing the negative effects throughout our political culture. For these reasons, I think memory studies, especially of the American past, should be a critical component of history education.