. @craigbrucesmith's written a very nice piece about the role that Commissions have played in the past to help us understand our history and suggests that now might be a good time to bring together historians to address recent attempts to politicize history. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/22/biden-trump-1776-commission-461483

It might be objected that, in this fractured age, it would be hard to get scholars representing different perspectives to work productively on such a Commission but our history provides otherwise. For instance:

A similar project funded by an Act of Congress for the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution produced a really nice series of civics texts called We The People: The Citizen and the Constitution that is still being updated. https://www.civiced.org/textbooks 

Similarly the @ConstitutionCtr has an online Constitution that links to explanations of the text co-authored by members of the @acslaw and the @FedSoc, two organizations whose members usually disagree, to ensure scrupulous and unbiased scholarship.

In sum, @craigbrucesmith's timely proposal could help us to understand what we DO commonly understand regarding our nation's past and its legacy as a way of moving forward constructively, breaking up the usual ideological siloes that just speak past one another.