Learning History in America

The essays in this book, like all other texts, have been written in a historical context that shapes both the themes and the prose styles of the authors. A close reading of these texts would in fact lead to many overlapping contexts of politics, social hierarchies, modern communications, and international relations, but we want to focus briefly on two contextual influences that carry the most obvious connections to this book: the wide-ranging public debate about the proper curriculum for American schools and universities, and the more specific debate among historians about new trends in historical scholarship.