UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Our learned scholars at work....

"Academics will point out that they’re not running for office. Their commitment is to writing what is true, not what is popular. But on that measure, American Quarterly is a failure. The cartoonish picture of America found in its pages constitutes educational malpractice."

American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject
Eighty percent of articles in the field’s leading journal were negative, while not one was positive.
By Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin
Jan. 22, 2026 4:51 pm ET

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.

On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.

Yet we found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

We were generous in tagging articles as neutral. Virtually every one of these 19 articles raised at least one critique (racism, sexism and the like), but they also typically described the ways in which members of marginalized communities were able to resist. Implicit in the articles is the sense that there may be a kernel of something good in a society that enables individuals to rise above oppression.

We coded as neutral, for instance, an article describing how the black American journalist Ida B. Wells fought against “narratives of black criminality, sexual aggression, and amorality” that “would be reanimated over and again to motivate racial and gender solidarity among whites and sanction white supremacist violence.” We also tagged as neutral an essay about the 1894 film “Buffalo Dance,” in which the author contrasts Native American culture and performance in the film with the “genocidal conditions caused by US colonization, including cultural prohibitions, imprisonment, and starvation.”

It’s astonishing that we couldn’t find a single positive article over a three-year period. There were none on American ingenuity. Readers wouldn’t come to understand why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901. Or why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon. There wasn’t a single article about America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There was no discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world. Readers of American Quarterly learn a great deal about America’s moral failings but nothing about its virtues.

What’s striking is the complete lack of gratitude on the part of scholars who write for the leading journal of American studies and benefit every day from the country’s commitment to liberty. Four-fifths of the world’s population can’t criticize their government without fear of reprisal. Despite the White House’s crackdown on universities (which we oppose), professors can and do regularly criticize President Trump without worrying about losing their livelihood or freedom.

American Quarterly is only one journal, but what’s found in its pages captures a much larger problem in education, particularly at the collegiate level. During our research, we contacted University of Texas at Austin historian Steven Mintz, who has analyzed the field of American studies. He told us: “A field that once asked, ‘What is America?’—exploring its myths, music, monuments, and contradictions—now too often narrows its focus to a different question: ‘Whom has America silenced, failed, or harmed?’ ”

This deeply pessimistic view of the U.S. has taken hold of many young people. When asked whether America’s founders are “better described as villains” or “heroes” in a poll cited by the Atlantic in 2024, about 4 in 10 Gen Z respondents chose “villains,” compared with only 1 in 10 baby boomers. The bigger problem, as Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) has said, is that “a nation cannot endure if its children are taught to loathe it.”

Mr. Trump goes too far in the other direction. His administration seeks to play down references to slavery in our national parks and has rejected an advisory committee’s recommendation to create commemorative coins for America’s 250th anniversary featuring heroes in the fight for racial justice such as Frederick Douglass and Ruby Bridges. As the nation focuses on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Democrats can and should critique Mr. Trump’s sugarcoated interpretation of history—but they will be credible only if they also loudly reject the distorted version of America articulated by the academic left.

This shouldn’t be hard. In the mid-20th century, Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy were unabashed patriots. When RFK ran for president in 1968, he spoke at the University of Alabama and underlined the privilege of being an American. “History has placed us all, Northerner and Southerner, black and white, within a common border and under a common law,” he said. “All of us, from the wealthiest and most powerful of men to the weakest and hungriest of children, share one precious possession: the name American.”

Academics will point out that they’re not running for office. Their commitment is to writing what is true, not what is popular. But on that measure, American Quarterly is a failure. The cartoonish picture of America found in its pages constitutes educational malpractice.

Mr. Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project and Mr. Lin is a policy research fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. This essay is adapted from their report, “The Distortion of American Studies.”


Link: Trust the experts