Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. Amy A. Kass is Senior Lecturer Emeritus College of the University of Chicago

The Meaning of America is a new curriculum for civic education. It is based on our anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (co-edited with Diana Schaub), which takes a literary approach to making citizens—one centering on stories and supplemented by great public speeches and patriotic songs.

How can we produce citizens who are thoughtfully and knowledgeably attached to our country, devoted to its ideals, and eager to live an active civic life? Studying our documents and learning our history can surely help. But stories are, in our view, even better. We need to furnish our imaginations with true stories of American heroes, stories that inspire emulation and the pride of kinship with those who have nobly gone before—the stories of Washington and Lincoln, of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. But we also can benefit greatly from fictional stories that not only inspire but also instruct. By giving us characters to identify with, stories provide concrete mirrors for self-discovery and self-examination. At their best, they shed light on the complexities of our situation and educate the sentiments in a richer and more sophisticated way.

The Meaning of America aims to demonstrate concretely how short stories can shed light on the meaning of American identity, character, and citizenship, and to do so by displaying and promoting learning not through lecturing but through genuine inquiry and searching conversation.

Our first session begins with a discussion of American national identity and why it matters. Sessions 2 through 5 are devoted to the American character: we explore what kind of citizens are likely to emerge in a nation founded on individual rights, equality, enterprise and commerce, and freedom of religion. Sessions 6 through 9 focus on virtues requisite for a more robust citizenry: self-command, law-abidingness, courage, and compassion. Our final session returns to the subject of American identity and its preeminent symbol, the flag, this time with a view to making one out of many.

• National identity and why it matters
  • Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country”
• The American character
  • Freedom and Individuality: Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
  • Equality: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”
  • Enterprise and Commerce: Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”
  • Freedom and Religion: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Maypole of Merry Mount”
• The virtues of civic life
  • Self-Command: Benjamin Franklin’s “Project for Attaining Moral Perfection”
  • Law-Abidingness: Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”
  • Courage and Self-Sacrifice: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s Speech to the Troops before the battle of Gettysburg and George S. Patton’s speech to the troops before D-Day
  • Compassion: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
• Making one out of many
  • Willa Cather’s “The Namesake”

Materials for each session include online texts of the stories and detailed teacher’s guides, each of which gives information about the author, a plot summary, and a series of thematically arranged questions for thinking about the story and for thinking with the story about larger American themes. These guides go beyond lesson plans intended to help students get the facts straight. Instead, they want to help readers probe the meaning of the story for enduring insights about important American and human matters.

In addition to the teacher’s guides, the curriculum for each session includes a video discussion of the story, conducted by a guest host with the editors of the anthology. These seminars help capture the experience of high-level discourse as participants interact and construct meaning from a classic American text. Shorter clips from the videos are interspersed throughout the study guides, to enable teachers (and students) to see how the questions may be discussed in the spirit of genuine inquiry.

The Meaning of America is designed to allow teachers to integrate lessons into their current classroom curriculum in any way they see fit. The lessons can be used across disciplines—not only for civics classrooms, but also for social studies, language arts, humanities, and other subject areas as well.

An additional bonus is the connection this curriculum has with the new Common Core standards. These standards not only mandate certain critical types of content, such as seminal works in American literature, for all students; they also advocate “close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding.” Literature and social studies teachers looking for models for teaching close reading and analyzing complex texts should find most welcome the headnotes, video segments, and, above all, the guiding questions that accompany each of the ten stories in our curriculum and the associated skills of critical thinking that they encourage and promote.

In brief, The Meaning of America reflects our own long experience in teaching and the principles derived from that practice: be serious; speak up, not down to students; ask them genuine questions; and encourage them in thoughtful reflection and honest conversation. Students treated in this fashion, more often than not, will rise to the occasion and vindicate your trust in their capacity to learn and grow—in mind, in heart, and in soul.

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EVENT SUMMARY

Governing Ideas

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When

Monday, January 09, 2012
9:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map

Event Materials

Reuters/Mike Blake

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

Email: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

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NUMBER 22

Secular or Christian? Exploring the Competing Narratives of Religion in America

The Brookings Institution, October 10, 2011

NUMBER 21

The Constitutionality of the Health Care Law’s Individual Mandate: An Oxford-Style Debate

The Brookings Institution, March 02, 2011

NUMBER 20

Disappearing God Gap: Religion’s Role in the 2008 Presidential Elections and Beyond

The Brookings Institution, March 16, 2010

View All »

In anticipation of the presidential election year, the Jack Miller Center asked Pulitzer Prize winning historian, and JMC Faculty member, Gordon S. Wood, for his thoughts on the most divisive campaign in U.S. History:

By Gordon Wood

In 1801 Thomas Jefferson had just been elected president after a hard-fought and bitter campaign between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. It was in fact one of themost tumultuous and vicious electoral campaigns in American history. The Federalist press had tagged Jefferson with every epithet they could think of–a coward, a radical, an atheist, and, most alarming, the leader of a gang of Jacobins who were trying to take over the American government and make it a satellite of revolutionary France. For their part the Republicans gave as good as they got, accusing the Federalists of trying to foist an English-style monarchy on America. Never in American history has the press been as abusive and as vituperative as it was in the electoral campaign of 1800.

All this newspaper scurrility took place in the wake of the Sedition Act of 1798, by which the Federalist-controlled Congress had attempted to curb the Republican press’s vitriolic attacks on President John Adams and other Federalist leaders. The Federalists had become convinced that elective republican governments could not allow the press to abuse their political leaders and undermine their capacity to rule. How could John Adams exercise his authority as president if he were victimized, as he put it, by “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies” that had ever been leveled against any public official?

Hence with the Sedition Act of 1798 the Federalists in Congress made it a federal crime to “write, print, utter or publish. . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing”  that brought the president or members of Congress “into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did, who meant by it, in contrast to the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published.  If a person’s publications were slanderous and calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious.

Although the Sedition Act horrified the Republicans, it was actually a liberalization of the English common law of seditious libel that continued to run in the state courts. Under the new federal statute, which resembled the liberal argument John Peter Zenger’s lawyer had used in 1735, the truth of what was said or published could be admitted as a defense, and juries could decide whether or not a particular piece was libelous and seditious.

The Republicans were in no mood to accept the Federalists liberalization of the common law. In the debate over the sedition law that spilled into the early nineteenth century several Republican libertarian theorists, including George Hay of Virginia and Tunis Wortman of New York, rejected both the old common law restrictions on the liberty of the press and the new legal recognition of the distinction between truth and falsity of opinion that the Federalists had incorporated into the Sedition Act.  While the Federalists clung to the eighteenth century’s conception that “truths” were constant and universal and capable of being discovered by enlightened and reasonable men, the Republican libertarians argued that opinions about government and governors were many and diverse and their truth could not be determined simply by individual judges and juries, no matter how reasonable such men were.  Hence, they concluded that all political opinions–that is, words as distinct from overt acts–even those opinions that were “false, scandalous, and malicious,” ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it in his First Inaugural Address, to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The Federalists were dumbfounded by these arguments. “How … could the rights of the people require a liberty to utter falsehood?” they asked.  “How could it be right to do wrong?”   It was not an easy question to answer, neither then nor later.  “Truth,” the Federalists said, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”  Any notion of multiple and varying truths would produce “universal uncertainty, universal misery,” and “set all morality afloat.”  People needed to know the “criterion by which we may determine with certainty, who are right, and who are wrong.”

Most Republicans felt they could not deny outright the possibility of truth and falsity in political beliefs, and thus they fell back on a tenuous distinction, developed by Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address, between principles and opinions.  Principles, it seemed, were hard and fixed, while opinions were soft and fluid; therefore, said Jefferson, “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” Individual opinions did not seem to count as much as they had in the past and thus could be permitted the freest possible expression.

What ultimately made such distinctions and arguments comprehensible was the Republicans’ assumption that opinions about politics were no longer the monopoly of the educated and aristocratic few.  Not only were true and false and even malicious opinions equally to be tolerated, but everyone and anyone in the society should be equally able to express them.  Sincerity and honesty, the Republican polemicists argued, were far more important in the articulation of ultimate political truth than learning and fancy words that had often been used to deceive and dissimulate.  Truth was actually the creation of many voices and many minds, no one of which was more important than another and each of which made its own separate and equally significant contribution to the whole.  Solitary opinions of single individuals may now have counted for less, but in their statistical collectivity they now added up to something far more significant than had ever existed before, something that the New York Republican Tunis Wortman referred to as “the extremely complicated term Public Opinion.”

Because American society was not the kind of organic hierarchy with “an intellectual unity” that the Federalists had wanted, public opinion in America, argued Wortman, the most articulate of the new Republican libertarians, could no longer be the consequence of the intellectual leadership of a few learned gentlemen.  General public opinion was simply “an aggregation of individual sentiments,” the combined product of multitudes of minds thinking and reflecting independently, communicating their ideas in different ways, causing opinions to collide and blend with one another, to refine and correct each other, leading toward “the ultimate triumph of Truth.” Such a product, such a public opinion, could be trusted because it had so many sources, so many voices and minds, all interacting, that no privileged individual or group could manipulate or dominate the whole.

This vast, impersonal, and democratic idea of public opinion, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick in disgust, “is of all things the most destructive of personal independence and of that weight of character which a great man ought to possess.”  But no matter, it was the people’s opinion, and it could be trusted because no one controlled it and everyone contributed to it.  Despite the Federalist warning that a government dependent exclusively on public opinion was a mere “democracy,” in which “opinion shifts with every current of caprice,” there was no turning back.  In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in the increasingly democratic America of the early Republic.

*

This essay is drawn from Empire of Liberty. Several of Professor Wood’s current books in print are available in our JMC Book Store.

Germany is the traditional villain in the story of World War I’s beginnings, but what if Russia played an even greater role?

By William Anthony Hay

From the Wall Street Journal Online

According to the conventional narrative, World War I began when a network of alliances drew ever-larger countries—in particular Germany,France and Britain—into a general conflict that spread from the Balkans after the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Germany bears responsibility for the war, in this view, because its leaders deliberately turned a regional clash between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into an existential struggle of rival alliances. Sean McMeekin challenges these assumptions with “The Russian Origins of the First World War,” proposing Russia as the driving force in the brinksmanship that led to the terrible slaughter of 1914-18.

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the long shadow cast by the Soviet Union have tended to diminish attention to Russia’s role in the war. And writing Russian history from a Western perspective presents its own difficulties, from the notorious trouble of gaining access to Russian archives to the scarcity of Anglophone historians who know the language well enough to conduct worthwhile research. Writers, like many generals at the time, have tended to treat the Western Front as the war’s central focus, with everything else a sideshow.

Mr. McMeekin, who teaches international relations at Bilkent University in Turkey, proposes that the war’s real catalyst lay in Russia’s imperial ambition to supplant the waning Ottoman Empire in the Near East and to control the Turkish straits—the Bosphorus and Dardanelles—linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

Although he fills a real gap by showing the view from St. Petersburg, Mr. McMeekin overstates his case. Russia certainly played a larger role than is generally credited in the July Crisis that followed the archduke’s assassination. But Russia did not primarily drive events, as he claims. Other parts of the story, especially the view from Berlin, are essential to showing the full picture.

|Read the Full Review|

From the Wall Street Journal

By PETER BERKOWITZ

America’s crisis of civic education is acute, requiring a major change in the way students are taught about the workings of American governmentand the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. So contends David Feith, an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, in his introduction to “Teaching America,” a well-crafted collection of essays from a distinguished and diverse group of authors—progressives and conservatives, policy makers and professors, jurists and political commentators.

The case for civic education—what might have been called “civics” in an earlier generation—is straightforward. Just as, say, doctors who receive defective medical training will be handicapped in the performance of their professional tasks, so too citizens whose civic education is lacking will be less than competent as members of an extended political community. Studying the Constitution—not to mention American political ideas and institutions—can help us all to exercise our rights and respect the rights of others and to weigh the merit of contending policies. More generally, as Mr. Feith notes, civic education can nourish a common culture by showing that partisan disputes often reflect conflicting interpretations of a shared commitment to freedom and equality.

—

Universities have contributed significantly to the decline of civic education. For starters, there is the lopsided attention that history departments give to society and culture; the transformation of political science into a discipline devoted to statistics and mathematical modeling; and the rise of schools of education that focus on theories of pedagogy at the expense of academic content. Still, universities will have to play a pivotal role if civic education is to be revived. Adm. Mike Ratliff, president of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History, surveys a number of programs—at the University of Virginia, MIT and the University of Texas, for example—that pointedly teach the American political tradition, often by using a great-books approach.

Though liberal democracies are particularly dependent on civic education, they face a peculiar difficulty in providing it: Cultivating an educated citizenry risks prescribing orthodox beliefs and trampling the independence of mind that a liberal education should promote.

|Read More| |Buy Teaching America Here|

In October 2010, Mr. William Osborn, the former CEO of Northern Trust Bank, held a luncheon for a group of distinguished jurists in Chicago to introduce them to the Jack Miller Center. The featured speaker was Gordon Wood, the preeminent historian of the American Founding and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. An attendee asked Professor Wood why education in America’s Founding Principles and history is no longer commonly included in the curricula at most colleges and universities.

This question inspired the following conversation about why colleges are failing to teach, and students are failing to learn, about America’s past. The JMC’s Dr. Pamela Edwards met with Professor Wood and Jack Greene in early February 2011 to discuss the state of historical study in today’s university. Professor Greene is one of the seminal figures in the field of Atlantic history and is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University.

An excerpted version of this conversation can be read below, and is also featured in the JMC’s 2010 Annual Report. To request a copy of the report, please email Emily Koons (ekoons@gojmc.org)

Pamela Edwards: You’ve both had very distinguished careers teaching American history. What is your feeling about the current state of the field and what would you like to see for it?

Gordon Wood: I think in terms of constitutional history, it’s generally not being taught at the undergraduate level. Of course the law schools are still teaching American constitutional history, but by and large, legal and constitutional history along with diplomatic history has been shunted aside (at the undergraduate level) over the last generation by cultural history.

PE: Why has this happened?

GW: Race and gender issues have become very, very important because of contemporary issues, and they have dominated many history departments, certainly my own. It’s been at the cost of some of these older, traditional fields. It takes sometimes 20 or 30 years, but you do have new people coming up and they have new interests, and there will be new contemporary issues that focus on the past that we want to understand. It’s not surprising that the best studies of slavery came out of the 1960s civil rights movement. People wanted to know where did this race problem come from and so it’s natural to do that. And the women’s movement of the 1970s generated a tremendous number of works on women in the past.

Jack Greene: Even when they do teach American history, it’s highly distorted I think. When they teach American Constitutional history for instance, it’s a history of the Supreme Court. Let’s face it, the Supreme Court wasn’t very important until the 20th Century. What they don’t do is give you a history of the Virginia Supreme Court in the early half of the 19th Century, which has a very rich history. I actually think this is part of a broader problem, which is using the national state as a framework for historical studies. If you really wanted to do an accurate history of the American nation, it would be a history that gave more attention to what was going on in the states. It’s a complicated thing. It’s very difficult to do that. American history textbooks, if you look at one, have a little bit on the colonial period and on the revolution and then they move from one election to the next election. So mostly, it’s elections, which didn’t have much meaning or bearing on the lives of these people who were living in the United States.

GW: You’re quite right. Even in teaching constitutional history, they focus on the Supreme Court. There are only two books that are on the federal district courts that have been written, and the district courts in most states were one per state, and I think there’s one in Kentucky. But all those other district courts, nobody has worked on those and we know so little. So much was taking place at the federal district if you’re talking about the federal law. The states are the really important arena for most events but even at the federal level, we know very little.

JG: I think one of the most important things that should be done in any history course is to give students a strong sense of anachronism. The United States was, in 1776, a kind of unintended consequence of this revolt against Britain. People had come together in 1774 and ‘75 and they had this strong sense that they had these unities that bound them together and so forth. But the idea of creating a significantly empowered national government is an idea that grows out of the experience of the 1780’s, as Gordon has explained so successfully in a number of books. I want to get back to your original question and make a point about how people moved away from constitutional history into social history and cultural history. In doing that, I think that it’s true that at the moment, people seem to be ignoring something that Gordon and I both are still interested in, but at the same time, it has drawn people into an interest and a stake in history that has a potential to rework and revive things like American constitutional history. It’s just that, as African Americans for instance, come to realize they have a history, which for a long time was very marginal and not central.

GW: Almost denied.

JG: Almost denied and not central. Women were certainly even more deeply denied. It’s very hard to ignore slavery. But it was easy to ignore women. When you thought of history in terms of some sort of paradigm or power, men had the power. So if history is about power, I think there is potential there for reviving, and in a very different way and with a much richer fallout, the history of the Constitution, interest in the American Constitution.

PE: And so is that really the new project perhaps, to create a very rich, complex context but at the same time to be able to have an integrated narrative again? Could you tell not one narrative but a number of extremely important exciting ones that are interdependent without flattening context and details entirely? Is that the way one would want to move do you think?

GW: You have to have multiple narratives because there’s just too much information, too many stories out there and it becomes very difficult. There is a stake in history. It’s not life and death, but it is important how one views the past of your country, and if it’s a depressing story of murderous killing of native peoples and enslaving of Africans and that’s it, then it’s a little depressing for youngsters to get that. So you need to offset that kind of negative story with some kind of sense of what the country has been besides that. But these are contested all the time and that contest will go on because the stakes are high because people have agendas that they are promoting in the present. It’s the present that drives the interpretations of the past. We’re not antiquarians. We don’t wallow back in the past for its own sake. My own view is that questions of the present lead you to want to find answers but the present shouldn’t dictate the answers you come up with. And that’s generally happened. The first forays into the slavery in the 1960s may have been crude but people get away from the present and they just get fascinated with the authenticity of the past and they forget why they even went to investigate the subject. That’s the best kind of history.

PE: I’d like to ask each of you what you imagine or would hope for the field in American history in the next decade.

GW: I don’t know what’s going to happen but I would hope there would be some return at least to a sophisticated political, diplomatic; I mean certainly there is a greater awareness of the world, and Jack has been a pioneer in Atlantic history, way back before it was called Atlantic history. He was, at Hopkins, creating the Atlantic world as a source of study. So that has enriched things, but I think looking at the world because we, the United States, are a world power now, a super power and so it’s natural that we want to think about things in this worldwide aspect, and that just complicates the past even more.

PE: Jack any final thoughts?

JG: I’ve always thought that the function of historical studies generally was to create critical citizens and to give them a sense of skepticism about received wisdom. I think that if we can continue doing that, it doesn’t really very much matter what subjects we’re taking up. It’s just a matter of making people aware of the past and of difference.

GW: And how complicated the past is.

Professor Ronna Burger

Professor of Philosophy and Sizeler Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Tulane University

“Maimonides on Knowledge of Good and Evil:
The Guide of the Perplexed I.2″

November 10, Thursday, 4:30 P.M.

Roosevelt University
Sullivan Room (2nd floor)
430 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

For further information contact Professor Stuart Warner at 312-218-5955

Courage

The Politics of Life and Limb

Richard Avramenko

Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb is a compelling and highly original study of the paradox of courage. Richard Avramenko contends that courage is not simply one virtue among many; rather, it is the primary means for humans to raise themselves out of their individualistic, isolated, and materialistic existence. As such, courage is an absolute and permanent good for collective human life. Specifically, Avramenko argues that when we risk “life and limb” for one another we reveal a fundamental care that binds our community together. Paradoxically, the same courage that brings humans together also drives us apart because courage is traditionally understood as manly, by definition, exclusionary, inegalitarian, and violent.

Avramenko explores the efforts of political thinkers throughout history—such as Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Tocqueville—to reformulate courage so as to hold fast to all that is good about it while jettisoning that which is problematic. In addition to martial courage, the book looks at political courage, moral courage, and economic courage.

Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb makes a vital contribution to the discipline of political science. Clearly and engagingly written, the book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political theory, ethics, and gender studies.

Buy It Now

Richard Avramenko is assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the co-editor, with John von Heyking, of Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

“In his ambitious book, Richard Avramenko has given us a profound and rigorous treatment of four important phases in the self-understanding of courage. Avramenko has done much more than provide a snapshot of the ‘red badge of courage’; he has taken courage as a prism within which the history of political thought can be viewed. As a consequence, he has also shown how courage is more than a one-dimensional invocation, but a many-faceted virtue whose meaning remains inexhaustible. He has mapped the terrain with a mastery that will be difficult to surpass.” —David John Walsh, The Catholic University of America

“In this engaging book, written with a sharp eye and keen sensibilities, Richard Avramenko traces the multifaceted history of courage from its Homeric manifestations to the modern day. Through creative and subtle readings of important texts, both ancient and modern, Avramenko chronicles the transformation of courage from its association with the manly violence of an Achilles or the Spartan three hundred into a virtue that, while still entailing an ever-essential care for others, sheds its connection with manliness and becomes compatible with the equality that is so much a part of today’s democratic regimes.” — Arlene Saxonhouse, University of Michigan