Yet without a single integrative narrative of the American experiment, American historical understanding tilts toward the pattern of the Articles of Confederation. In 2018, Harvard’s Donald Yacovone published a scathing review of 3,000 American history textbooks stretching back into the 19th century which depicted slavery as a benign institution where “untutored” blacks could “enjoy picnics, barbecues, singing, and dancing.” These textbooks “never mentioned any abolitionists or even an antislavery movement” and wrote off Reconstruction as a laboratory demonstration of “black incapacity.” That included, to Yacovone’s chagrin, the textbook he had read in a fifth-grade class in California. The fracturing of a shared history has been accelerated by the guilty realization that a good many shared histories in the past have really shared very little. Rodgers called the Age of Fracture (2011), in which “shared traditions, values, and customs” are defended only by “conservative intellectuals who not taken the libertarian turn, who still society in organic terms.” The Connecticut scheme gives us fracture good and hard. As Representative Gale Mastrofrancesco objected, there seems to be little reason why the state should mandate a course on one “particular culture and it’s not mandated that we offer it about every other culture.” Yet the Connecticut proposal is testimony to a diminishing confidence that the history of the United States can be understood as a synthetic, national whole.

The difficulty lies in assuming that history should be taught piecemeal, race by race or culture by culture. Given that African Americans compose nearly 12% of the state’s population (and Hispanics over 16%) this may not be an unreasonable demand. But “religious, racial and ethnic groups, women, minorities, labor, unions-all these movements in America-they were lucky if they got one or two lines in one of our history books.” It was time, added Representative Bobby Gibson of Bloomfield, to shift the focus in history teaching to the “many contributions have been given to this country, to this state, by African Americans and by Latinos.” “American history seemed to be a long catalog of kings, presidents, generals, a few industrialists and a couple of investors, that was about it,” complained the bill’s sponsor, Edwin Vargas of Hartford. Arlier this year, the Connecticut legislature adopted a bill which mandated the creation of a one-credit course on black and Latino history for the state’s high schools.

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