Chapter 5: Schematic Templates and Diverse Populations in the United States: Narrative Limitations in Young People’s Understanding

The use of history in the United States is so fundamental (and problematic) for promoting nationalism and national identity, and scholarship in the country is so extensive and complex—in terms of both sheer quantity of output and its critical stance toward national ideals and their historic and contemporary development—that it would be impossible to review the topic in a brief chapter. Even attempting to suggest key works in the field would be hopelessly complicated, and any recommendations would inevitably be radically incomplete. However, Wertsch’s (1998) distinction between “producers” and “consumers” (p. 83) of historical narratives points to a more manageable task. Rather than attempting to synthesize work on how narratives of national history have been represented in the United States, this chapter focuses instead on how young people appropriate those narratives. This is a smaller and more limited body of research, but it has important implications for how we think about the task of confronting nationalism in the United States, particularly in school settings.