AMERICAN HISTORY'S TOP 10: "[The] discoveries of who we are arise from understanding who we have been.... To lose our history is to lose ourselves.".

• Author: Guelzo, Allen
• Position: EDUCATION

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was only 28 years old, but already he was worried about the loss of memory--not his own, but the nation's memory of its Revolutionary Founders. "I do not mean to say," Lincoln declared in a speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, ID, in 1838, "that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time."

As that occurred, Lincoln fretted that the principles which guided the Revolutionary generation also would become dim and Americans would be tempted to follow the lure of some "Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon." Is it unreasonable, he asked, "to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us?" The question of what was being remembered from the past, and why, was a very real one for young man Lincoln.

It is not any less important today, although for a very different set of reasons. In 2014, a report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 18% of American eighth-graders could be considered "proficient" in U.S. history. In a 2019 survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, less than half the respondents in the 18-to-29-year-old bracket could identify the 19th Amendment as the instrument that extended voting rights to U.S. women, or 1861 as the year the Civil War began. Only 18% in that age bracket correctly answered, "What government action freed all the slaves in the United States?" with "the 13th Amendment." Worse still, only 10% of the 18- to 29-year-olds knew that James Madison was regarded as the "Father of the Constitution."

So, before we helplessly watch the teaching of history fade entirely from our screens, it might be a good idea to determine just what about American history we should be teaching, and knowing:

The Founding was an unbelievably unique event--and still is--in human history. The American Revolutionaries--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin--very much were men of the Enlightenment, and they set out to create an entirely new political order, one that abolished hierarchy entirely. Sovereignty, in their new order, would be lodged with the commoners; there would be no nobility or kings. They expressed this in the three triumphant words that begin the 1787 Constitution: "We the People." What identified these people was not their status at birth, but the possession of certain natural rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--with which they were all equipped equally.

This was a phenomenally original achievement, and it excited first the laughter and then the enmity of the...