If the historian is committed to democracy, as most textbook writers are, then the agents of history are presumed to be “the people.” We the people need a national history because, after all, America still exists, and the course of our history will depend, tautologically, on us-the same us that is also, in theory, history’s readers. The journalist (.)Ģ Most textbooks push that ending back by returning, in those final pages that few students ever read, to founding principles-to the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence, say, or in the Constitution’s preamble-and concluding with the hope that American reality will one day meet them.
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