The War to Control the Past : The right wants to portray America’s history without the blemishes.

Lynne Cheney attacks it as a work of “political correctness.” Rush Limbaugh wants to flush it down the toilet. Pat Buchanan calls it horrendous.

What is causing the right wing to go ballistic? Is it pornography? Another controversial artistic exhibit funded by taxpayers’ hard-earned money?

No, it’s history. A few weeks ago, the National Center for History in the Schools (funded jointly by UCLA and the National Endowment for the Humanities) released the standards to be used in textbooks teaching U.S. history and immediately ignited another battle in the cultural wars. They then released the guidelines for teaching world history, an act some compare to throwing gasoline onto a firestorm.

The fight over the nation’s memory of its past is nothing less than a struggle for political control of the country’s future. Americans may be famous for their historical amnesia, but they are passionately divided about how they want their nation’s history told.

It began when Congress decided to bolster students’ competency in the humanities by commissioning a teachers’ guide for fifth through 12th grades. Lynne Cheney, who as chair of the National Endowment during the Bush Administration, appointed a panel of historians to provide a standard for the history curriculum. To her dismay, these scholars have emerged with a story she didn’t want told. The document is too “gloomy,” Cheney complains. American history should celebrate the country’s accomplishments.

What is so repugnant about this new history curriculum? It views the past with a critical, rather than a simply celebratory perspective. It argues that no nation, not even the United States, is without flaws. Massacres of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and the killing of striking workers are also a part of our nation’s complicated past. But the new history is not all gloom and doom. It also celebrates the passionate efforts by the named and unnamed to broaden the nation’s commitment to democracy.

The new history is inclusive. Rather than focusing only on great men and triumphant events, the new history integrates the lives of ordinary people--women, ethnic and racial minorities and workers--into the nation’s story.

Is the new history, as some critics claim, an example of political correctness gone awry? No, but it may seem that way to those who insist upon an “official” story that fantasizes the unblemished triumph of American democracy.

The truth is, every generation of historians rewrites the past. What the right really hates about this new history is that it has been written by some of the same people who fought against segregation and gender discrimination, who protested the Vietnam War and gave birth to the environmental and gay-rights movements. It is a generation that has witnessed--in Watergate and in the S & L failures of the 1980s--too much political and economic corruption to collaborate in a cover-up account of the nation’s past.

It is a generation that believes the democratic promise of America, magnificent as it is, is still unfolding and has yet to be realized by everyone.

This generation of historians has produced an immense body of scholarship that challenges the congratulatory story of American history. They have asked hard questions and sought honest answers. Why, for example, did a nation founded on the stunning vision of justice and equality establish a republic reliant on a slave economy? Why has a society that has depended on the cheap labor of immigrants launched periodic crusades against them?

Cultural critics on the right worry that such questions will erode students’ patriotism. But real love--whether for a person or a nation--develops out of a full acceptance of the beloved’s strengths and weaknesses.

The new history depicts successive generations of Americans seeking access to the nation’s political and economic life. But it also describes the racial, gender and class barriers that have excluded some citizens from participating in the American dream. For the new historians, the great experiment in American democracy is still unfolding.

The right’s quarrel with this version of the past is that they believe the United States has already fulfilled its democratic promise. History, in other words, is over.

But history never ends. Nor do unpleasant truths destroy a nation’s social fabric.

The real danger to a democracy is an official history written to justify the status quo. George Orwell understood the magnitude of this threat, writing in his classic novel, “1984”: “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”