Gary B. Nash, 88, Dies; Drew Ire for Trying to Update History Education
A respected scholar of early America, he became a central figure in the culture wars that enveloped the country in the 1990s.
Gary B. Nash, a historian who became a reluctant national celebrity in the mid-1990s when his work on a set of national history standards made him a target for Rush Limbaugh, Lynne Cheney and other prominent conservatives, died on July 29 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.
His wife, Cynthia Shelton, said the cause was colon cancer.
Dr. Nash had already retired from his position as a highly regarded scholar of early American history at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994 when his university-backed organization, the National Center for History in the Schools, released a draft of its “National Standards for United States History,” a guide for elementary and high school teachers.
Drawing on the latest academic scholarship, he and his team urged teachers to move beyond the rote memorization of dates and famous names. The standards de-emphasized the conventional “great man” approach to history, Dr. Nash told The Chicago Tribune in 1994, in favor of giving students “a slightly different view of themselves as history makers, even if they are not going to become senators or presidents of a corporation.”
Though the project originated in the administration of George H.W. Bush, it immediately drew fire from conservatives. On his television show, Mr. Limbaugh said that the 271-page report should be “flushed down the toilet,” underlining his point by tearing pages out of a history book. Other commentators called Dr. Nash and his team “Nazis” and “history thieves.”
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The guidelines came with examples of lessons and classroom activities, many of which, critics said, revealed the authors’ left-leaning bias — for example, they suggested a mock trial to decide whether John D. Rockefeller had used illegal means to amass his millions.
The most pointed attack came from Ms. Cheney, who in 1991, as the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had provided about half the funding for Dr. Nash’s project. (The Department of Education provided the rest.) She later said she deeply regretted her decision.
“Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president,” she wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1994. “The authors tend to save their unqualified admiration for people, places and events that are politically correct.”
Dr. Nash took pains to emphasize the collaborative nature of the project, which relied on contributions from hundreds of teachers and professors, regardless of their political bent. But it was to no avail: He became the singular target of conservative wrath, and he spent months rising before dawn in Los Angeles to defend his efforts on morning talk shows broadcast from the East Coast.
The standards were just one front in the “history wars” that raged throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s. Other battles surrounded the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere and a 1994 exhibition at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum about the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in World War II.
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The Clinton White House disavowed the Nash group’s guidelines, and federal funding dried up. Dr. Nash announced in 1995 that the standards would be revised by an outside panel of experts, using private donations, and in 1996 they released an updated draft, with minor changes and without the examples and suggested exercises.
Most critics were mollified — though not Ms. Cheney — and the standards were quietly accepted by school districts around the country. In 1997, Dr. Nash and two of his colleagues, Ross E. Dunn and Charlotte Crabtree, published “History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past,” in which they defended their work and called on their colleagues to produce more like it.
“If Cecil B. DeMille was correct in arguing that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then historians ought to welcome the excitement,” they wrote. “History is unceasingly controversial because it provides so much of the substance for the way a society defines itself and considers what it wants to be.”
Gary Baring Nash was born on July 27, 1933, in Merion, Pa., a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. His father, Ralph, was a sales manager for General Electric; his mother, Edith (Baring) Nash, was a homemaker.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1955, he spent three years in the Navy and then returned to Princeton for graduate school. He received his doctorate in 1964 and began teaching at U.C.L.A. two years later.
His first marriage ended in divorce. Along with his wife, Dr. Nash is survived by his sister, Carol Knowlton; his brother, Ralph Nash; his son, David; his daughters, Brooke Nash, Robin Johnson and Jennifer Nash Durante; and nine grandchildren.
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Before he became famous as Mr. Limbaugh’s bête noire, Dr. Nash was widely regarded as a leading figure in so-called New Left history, which rejected the discipline’s traditional focus on elites as the movers of history in favor of everyday people.
His book “Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America” (1974), for example, looked at the colonial era through the eyes of Native Americans, working-class whites, and free and enslaved Black people.
Though he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles, Dr. Nash remained fond of Philadelphia and often used his native city to illustrate his man-on-the-street approach. In “The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution” (1979), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he looked at how shifting political ideas among sailors, dockworkers and other working-class people in Philadelphia — as well as in Boston and New York — had played a crucial role in the movement for independence.
“He changed the focus of what people did from the standard study of ideology and ideas to actions on the ground by everyday people,” Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell University, said in an interview.
Dr. Nash saw a continuation between his approach to history and his engagement with contemporary education and grass-roots politics. After the Watts riots in 1965, he joined an organization that supported Black entrepreneurs. He worked to desegregate Pacific Palisades, the wealthy area of Los Angeles where he lived. And after the university’s Board of Regents fired the Black activist Angela Davis from her job as a sociology professor, Dr. Nash led a faculty committee in an attempt to get her rehired.
Though his critics often tarred him as anti-American or worse, Dr. Nash insisted that he was optimistic about the country.
“If you were a hard-left historian of the United States, you would not have written what he did; he was always optimistic about the United States,” said Carla Pestana, who studied with Dr. Nash as a graduate student and is now chairwoman of the U.C.L.A. history department. “He thought the real story was about ordinary people striving to make the country better.”
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Dr. Nash continued to write long after he retired; at his death he had one book, about the abolitionist Anne Mifflin, still to be published. And he continued to weigh in on debates about the importance of critical thinking and historical revision.
That included the current controversies surrounding how race and racism are taught in schools — a debate that, he believed, threatened a fundamental aspect of education in a democracy.
“In a liberal democracy, we want a division of opinion,” he said in a podcast for The Economist in July. “Patriotism is not just saluting the flag. It’s becoming responsible citizens who will take an active role in what’s going on around them.”
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