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In July 2012 I visited Independence Hall and other sites associated with the historic events of the birth of the United States in Philadelphia. The National Park Service offered a patriotic story of the location and era, complete with re-creations of the reading of the Declaration of Independence from 1776 and debates over the Constitution in 1787. Skilled interpreters wearing historic costumes illuminated the time and place and broadened the audience’s understanding of the experiences. The statement by Daniel Webster in 1837 emblazoned on the wall of the National Constitution Center, “One country, one Constitution, one destiny,” celebrates the creation story of the United States of America, one that values the Declaration of Independence as “American Scripture” and the Constitution as the product of essentially a “miracle” in Philadelphia (1). Much of what is presented in this setting, as well as in many others seeking to interpret the American past at museums and historic sites around the country, is built around a theme of “one nation, one people”; everyone coming together in a grand consensus of the American past that is exceptionalistic, nationalistic, and triumphant. The setting offers a celebration of the long tradition of shared American ideals and values that made the United States somehow different from other nations. In such a setting William Faulkner’s adroit statement—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—might be an understatement (2). This emphasis on consensus represents a continuing search for a usable past that helps us understand who we are and how we reached our current state. Such a goal aims toward the use of history— achievements and regrets; pride and disappointment—to affect decisions that may help create a better world. This quest for a usable past becomes both an expression of present communal understanding and future objectives (3). The emphasis on consensus in U.S. national history has been present from the nation’s beginnings, and there is, of course, considerable value in emphasizing the ideals that have brought Americans together as a people rather than focusing on the divisiveness in society. History might be viewed largely as a lesson in civics and a means of instilling in the nation’s citizenry a sense of awe and reverence for the nation-state and its system of governance. The rise of the “new social history” in the 1960s, with its emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and the way groups have wielded power throughout the nation’s past, offered a powerful counterweight to the consensus interpretation (4). In American history museums, and certainly in the Smithsonian Institution, that trend was manifested effectively in several exhibitions in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In one, “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915–1940,” at the National Museum of American History, curators interpreted the complexities and effects of the movement of more than one million African Americans from the rural South to metropolises in the North in search of a better life (Figure 1). “Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air” at the National Air and Space Museum focused on the mythology of aerial combat versus its reality, especially regarding the long shadow

Public History Wars, the "One Nation/One People" Consensus, and the Continuing Search for a Usable Past