ABSTRACT
The natural sciences place the development of politics within the development of an evidence-based account of the entire known past that has moved through stages from the Big Bang. While human politics do represent a new degree of complexity with new properties compared to previous ones, human nature – and human politics – emerged from earlier natural forms. The first political topic that is reframed by the deep past is political identity – or how groups of people develop a sense of belonging. The teaching of history has often had a political objective of identity formation through a national origin story. American political identity is bound up with being aware of the history of the American experience. When the American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884, history had only emerged as a distinct academic discipline. Race or ethnic relations have been a long-standing issue in many nations, but certainly in the United States.
