Search online for “Do American students know history?” and the answer is negative. As is the case with math and reading, the National Assessment of Education Progress’ latest assessment tests revealed that student knowledge of the American past continues declining.

College students fare little better. A survey conducted 10 years ago by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) revealed depths of ignorance almost as great. In part, this lack of knowledge about our country’s past is simple negligence. As the ACTA report notes, few colleges and universities these days require even a basic American history course in their course of studies.

Unfortunately, many of those who do teach the American past take a political slant, almost always leftist, dwelling on our country’s wrongs and failures rather than on its actual history. Leftist presentations on slavery, the patriarchy, and capitalism are poisoned arrows shot into the heart of Americans without the balance of fairness or nuance.

Nor is this gloomy miseducation an invention of the past few years. It has gone on for decades, meaning that many middle-aged Americans are just as blind to their past as the young.

Now we stand poised on the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, the document that created our nation. With 2026 just around the corner, we might add to our New Year’s resolutions a pledge to learn more about the history of our nation and Western civilization, sharing what we learn with our children.

Here are just a few suggestions that may help you open the door on the past.

Read the books of historian David McCullough. Of special relevance are his “1776” and “John Adams.” These are fine accounts of the age which produced both the Declaration and our Constitution. For some more general inspiration, try his posthumous collection of articles and speeches, “History Matters.”

If you’re looking for an excellent textbook or overview, try Wilfrid McClay’s “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story,” which doubles as a handy reference book for any home library. The publisher, Encounter Books, has also put out A Young Reader’s Edition along with a workbook that serves both young and old.

“A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced,” McClay notes in his introduction. He also addresses a prevalent and wrongheaded view of the past, “presentism,” which is judgment of the past by today’s mores and standards. “One of the worst sins of the present—not just ours but any present—is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.” It is this combination of ignorance and superiority which partially fuels the hatred of country we see today.

Encounter has also just published “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition,” in which Princeton scholar Allen Guelzo and Harvard’s James Hankins combine their talents as historians to produce a magnificent and massive two-volume study of the roots and branches of Western civilization. Open the first volume and you’ll discover a 1,300-page treasure with 1,000 reproductions of Western art, 200 sidebars featuring historical and literary writing from the Greeks to the Renaissance, and 150 maps designed specifically to support the text.

In Volume I, the authors state that their histories are “for anyone who wants to understand the deep roots of the world in which we live.” They rightly contend that the history of Western civilization has “been hollowed out,” going on to say: “In more recent decades, as academe has increasingly been colonized by political activists, Western history has been positively disfavored. There has been a highly successful campaign to portray Western civilization as uniquely evil….”

Of course, hundreds of other histories, from elementary school biographies to Will and Ariel Durant’s massive “The Story of Civilization,” are available to us in our libraries, bookstores, and online. Pick the old ones, pick the good ones, start with the subjects that most interest, and let the learning begin.

In “History Matters,” McCullough opens with these words: “History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.”

He ends this same short essay, “How lucky we are, how very lucky we are, to live in the great country, to be Americans—Americans all.”

Studying our past will only deepen that gratitude.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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