The Strange World of AP U.S. History

The college-level course known as Advanced Placement U.S. History, or APUSH, occupies a strange space within U.S. history education. Any effort to tell the history of the United States to the public must wrestle with two competing impulses: first, to understand our past in all its complexity, warts and all; and second, to find within our past a source of inspiration and a shared identity. K-12 curricula, especially those mandated by state governments, tend to favor the latter impulse and embrace U.S. history as a means of instilling national identity and pride. But APUSH, because of its peculiar history, embodies both impulses. The resultant tension is something that teachers, students, and parents have long had to navigate.

The origins of APUSH can be traced back to a series of talks in the late 19th century between members of the American Historical Association and the National Education Association. The focus of these talks was reconciling the history curriculum requirements of high schools and universities. While college and university instructors urged that high-school curricula reflect history as taught at the university level, secondary educators pushed for a curriculum that more directly met the needs of high-school students and prepared them for responsible citizenship. Out of these talks was born the College Entrance Examinations Board (CEEB, or simply “College Board”) in 1899.¹

For its first half-century, College Board was primarily focused on testing high-school students for college admissions. With the onset of the Cold War, however, education became a matter of national security. U.S. policymakers were especially interested in math and science education, so that America’s future scientists and engineers could compete with the Soviet Union; there was also, however, pressure on history curricula to build a patriotic bulwark against communism. In 1952, the Ford Foundation consulted with representatives from select universities and high schools on how to foster the development of the country’s brightest students. Participants in the study proposed what became the Advanced Placement program, which would allow students who proved subject-matter mastery to enter college with course credits. College Board took on implementation of the program, including APUSH, in 1955.

Through conferences and other events, APUSH brought together secondary and higher-education teachers and forged a new ecosystem. Exams were (and still are) scored at annual readings which possessed a “camp-like quality… a happy combination of dogged labor, special friends, and intellectual discourse.”² High-school teachers sat alongside college professors and discussed U.S. history as fellow scholars, an attribute of the annual readings which College Board still uses to promote them to potential teacher applicants. Until recently, APUSH teachers were invited to submit questions for consideration by the test development committee, giving teachers a real sense of ownership in the course.³

The course’s design inspired a similar collaboration between AP teachers and their students. In 1973, APUSH added the Document-Based Question, requiring students to analyze primary-source documents under pressure during the exam; as a result, primary-source analysis became a hallmark of the class. For students, the intensity of the course inspired a sort of camaraderie with each other and with their teachers, many of whom did not have a strong background in historical research and were learning alongside them. This intensity increased the sense among APUSH students that they were truly “doing” history. In addition, the camaraderie of preparing for the exam often formed a long-time connection between teachers and former students. Students reported back to teachers what they were learning in their college classrooms, offering another form of collaboration between secondary and higher education through APUSH.⁴

Straddling both educational worlds, APUSH reflected paradigm shifts in both social studies reform movements and unfolding academic historiographies. In textbooks and course outlines, the earlier periods of U.S. history often remained rooted in older historiography, while more recent content drew on newer scholarship that tended to challenge consensus narratives and provide a greater focus on social history and underrepresented minorities. APUSH increasingly drew on that newer scholarship, urged on by the “New Social Studies” movement. But this coincided with a conservative backlash and a move toward more rigorous state content standards, especially with the publication of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk. APUSH, which already had one foot in the secondary classroom and the other in the college lecture hall, was now in the awkward position of trying to keep up to date with two increasingly oppositional views of U.S. history education. Stakeholders could credibly frame APUSH as a training program for patriotic citizenship or disruptive historical thinking, and in either case they could point to APUSH’s reputation for being a course where students learned “real” history.⁵

The contradiction at the heart of APUSH was most apparent in the battle over the 2014 course redesign. In an effort directed by College Board president David Coleman to introduce Common Core–style assessment, College Board revealed a new course framework in February 2014. Controversy immediately erupted. The conservative surgeon Ben Carson (who was about to launch a presidential campaign) took to Fox News, declaring, “I think most people when they finish that course, they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS.” The new framework earned official condemnation from the Republican National Committee, a targeted opposition campaign from the Concerned Women of America, and several bills to defund public school APUSH programs in states including Colorado, Georgia, and Oklahoma.⁶

All the fuss aside, the new framework was not substantially different from its predecessor. Where the old framework included vague references to diverse histories, the new framework divided the course into specific historical periods and added extensive detail, specifying the contributions of lesser-known figures like Little Turtle. The new framework also diversified the list of possible source documents that would appear on the exam, leaving the more familiar choices up to teachers but specifying the inclusion of others. But the course was still primarily a political history of the United States, and a triumphalist one at that. Moreover, in the face of nearly a year of partisan pressure, College Board capitulated to many of its critics’ demands and softened the wording in the framework. It also expanded the curriculum’s discussion of such topics as “American national identity and unity”; America’s “founding political leaders” and “Founding Documents”; America’s “role in victories of WWI and WWII” and “leadership in ending the Cold War”; and the “productive role of free enterprise, entrepreneurship, and innovation.”⁷

But College Board’s capitulation was not total. As politicians were decrying College Board’s “radically revisionist view of American history,” high-school students literally took to the streets, insisting, “We have a right to know history.”⁸ Students, teachers, and parents successfully shut down state GOP efforts to defund their APUSH programs or hold them hostage for major revisions. News media heralded their success as “little rebels,” even though the course still owed more to decades-old state content standards than the latest university-driven research.⁹ And yet it was that popular understanding of APUSH as cutting-edge university teaching that enabled parents to fend off GOP efforts to rehaul the course. The tension inherent in APUSH both protected the course from partisan tinkering and allowed it to remain firmly rooted in deeply conservative notions of didactic, great-man history.

U.S. history education has always been a contested ideological battleground, and conservative efforts usually prevail. In his landmark study Dare the School Create a New Social Order?, the sociologist George S. Counts even argued that by its structure as a preserver and deliverer of consensus knowledge, education is inherently unable to enact structural reform.¹⁰ The 2014–15 fight over the APUSH redesign highlighted the ways in which the unusual collaborative climate of APUSH can deviate from that pattern. Limited by its own origins to promote a triumphalist national narrative, the course also manages to maintain space for questioning that impulse. Tying the two rival views of U.S. history education to each other, APUSH presents teachers and students with the opportunity to examine and interrogate both. Educators’ best course of action may simply be to offer that contradiction to our students when they ask us “teach us the truth.”¹¹

1. For a comprehensive summary of the permutations of shifting secondary history education goals, see Hazel W. Hertzberg’s Project SPAN Report Social Studies Reform, 1880–1980 (Boulder, CO: Social Science Education Consortium, 1981).
2. Eric Rothschild, “Four Decades of the Advanced Placement Program,” History Teacher 32 (Feb. 1999): 188.
3. For more on the unique culture of the readings, see An Informal History of the AP Readings, 1956–1976 (New York: College Entrance Examinations Board, 1980).
4. For more on the development and evolution of the AP program, see John A. Valentine, The College Board and the School Curriculum: A History of the College Board’s Influence on the Substance and Standards of American Education, 1900–1980 (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1987).
5. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983). For more on the battles over social studies curriculum, see Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004); and Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).(
6. Valerie Strauss, “Ben Carson: New AP U.S. History course will make kids want to ‘sign up for ISIS,’” Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2014; Republican National Committee, Counsel’s Office, “Resolution Concerning Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH),” Aug. 8, 2014; Concerned Women of America, “Resources and Action Items: New AP (anti) US History Curriculum Framework,” Feb. 25, 2015.
7. “The 2015 AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description,” AP Central, accessed Oct. 16, 2020.
8. Republican National Committee, Counsel’s Office, “Resolution Concerning Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH)”; “Jefferson County Teachers Participating In ‘Sick Out’ Could Be Docked Pay,” CBS Denver, Sept. 29, 2014.
9. “US ‘little rebels’ protest against changes to history curriculum,” The Guardian, Sept. 26, 2014; “Changes in AP history trigger a culture clash in Colorado,” Washington Post, Oct. 5, 2014.
10. George S. Counts, Dare the Schools Create a New Social Order? (1932; reprint, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
11. “In pics: Students go shirtless to protest against history curriculum,” third photo, India Today, Sept. 26, 2014.