ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1994, an explosive controversy began in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne V. Cheney, wrote a blistering critique of national standards for the teaching of American and world history that her own agency had underwritten during her tenure. Anyone who hopes to understand his or her own life, as well as to comprehend events in society and the world, must have a firm grasp of history. The US history standards were attacked for political bias; the world history standards were assailed for minimizing the importance of the West. The original history standard—sespecially the standards for US history—reflected the significant influence of those social historians who have used race, class, and gender as lenses through which to view the past. The state's history standards lack any specificity and refer to events in sweeping and meaningless terms.
