Sam Wineburg sent a survey to high school students in all 50 states, which said, ”Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history.“ The one restriction was that presidents and their wives were excluded.
The results Wineburg, a Stanford University professor, and his then-graduate assistant, Chauncey Monte-Sano, discovered have been received either as poppycock or as ground-breaking evidence that this country is in the midst of change.
The 2,000 students were surveyed between March 2004 and May 2005. Of the top 10 people named by students in grades 11 and 12, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman topped the list.
And the results did not vary by region or the political leanings of voters in a state.
In fact, four of the top 10 people were black and six of the 10 were women.
When the findings were first reported in February, Wineburg was called vile names and was listed on neo-Nazi Web sites in unkind ways.
”The conservatives hated it,“ he said in a recent phone interview. ”They were feeling threatened by it.“
Wineburg says the results are evidence that this country is moving past its self-imposed racial barriers and becoming unified.
”For today's teens, America is represented by people identified with the struggle for civil rights,“ Wineburg wrote in the May issue of Phi Delta Kappa International. ”Irrespective of the skin color of the respondents, the figures they select most often to tell the American story are African-American.“
But the results weren't just found in students. Wineburg and Monte-Sano surveyed 2,000 adults between June 2005 and August 2005 and found, surprisingly, that the top 10 lists were almost identical. Eight of the names were the same.
What is going on here?
”I think what is so threatening is that there is a change in this country,“ Wineburg said. ”We would not have Obama as a presidential candidate if there were not a profound change in this country.“
Wineburg said he ”tripped“ over this discovery while studying a small number of families in the Pacific Northwest.
”We were looking for something else and a piece of gold dust fell in our hair,“ he said. ”We said, "wait a second.'“
Because he was exploring how those families understand American history and not their shared views, however, Wineburg said he put the findings aside.
When a student visiting from Oberlin College asked to send the ”Famous American“ survey to her high school in Tennessee and a high school in Ohio, Wineburg agreed. He caught her enthusiasm and sent surveys to his friends with connections to high schools in New York, California and Colorado.
The two-part survey asked students to name five famous Americans. One part, with five lines drawn, asked for anyone. The second part asked for famous women, which might be the reason so many women landed in the top 10.
With the help of Monte-Sano, who is now an assistant professor of eduction at the University of Maryland, they analyzed the results.
Since the results were first published in February, Wineburg's name has been mud on some Web sites. He realized the results would make a ”big splash,“ he said, but he didn't anticipate the viciousness of the name-calling.
”Change is never easy,“ he said. ”After a while, I just stopped reading.“
In the final paragraph of his findings, Wineburg wrote: ”The common denominators that today draw together Americans of different colors, regions and ages look somewhat different than those of former eras. While there are still some inventors, entrepreneurs, and entertainers, the people who come to the fore are those who acted to expand rights, alleviate misery, rectify injustice and promote freedom. Even if the narratives people hold about those individuals are denatured, distorted, decontextualized, and declawed, the fact that they were told in Columbia Falls, Mont.; Cranston, R.I.; Little Rock, Ark.; Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and Anchorage, Alaska seems at this juncture to be deeply symbolic of the national story we tell ourselves about who we think we are ... and perhaps who we aspire to become.“
”The person who defines America is King and what he stands for,“ Wineburg said.
”We like to disrespect young people, but maybe we need to refashion what we think of them.“
I agree, and I hope he is right. I hope we Americans are finally ending our 40-year circuitous journey through the desert.
Equality, unity, milk and honey all sound pretty good to me.
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