East Asia in the National Standards for World History

The National Standards for History consist of a set of voluntary guidelines intended as a curricular compendium—not a single suggested syllabus—for teaching history in the schools. The product of several years of work by literally thousands of scholars and teachers, the Standards represent one version of the state of the historical field in the United States in the mid-1990s. ¹ Their initial publication in late 1994 unleashed what came to be called “a firestorm of controversy,” bringing unexpected national attention and public condemnation. Conservative critics accused the Standards of having “hijacked history,” and in early 1995, the Senate passed, 99 to 1, a nonbinding resolution against the Standards. ² The sudden flammability of the controversy derived largely from the politics of the mid-term congressional election of November 1994, with the result that polemical heat overwhelmed historical light and polarized, rather than galvanized, the forces interested in improving historyteaching in the schools.