The New York Public Library, Unsplash Imagine, for a moment, the year is 2500. Human civilization is gone, lost to disaster, time, or neglect. One day, an alien research team lands in what was once North Carolina and begins to study the ruins of a place once known as Duke University. Buried beneath centuries of sediment, they find a course directory from the Department of History, dated 2025. What would these visitors conclude about American history? Would they know about the Revolutionary War and its heroes, Washington crossing the Delaware, the debates at Valley Forge, the intellectual courage of the Founding Fathers? Would they learn about the immigrants who built the railroads, the entrepreneurs who transformed an agricultural society, or the soldiers who fought fascism across two oceans?
At Duke, far too few American History professors specialize in non-identitarian fields. Almost certainly not. They would come away knowing far less about the broad sweep of American history—its political transformations, economic changes, diplomatic turning points, and cultural achievements—than about a narrow range of faculty preoccupations, many of them rooted in identity politics or highly specialized subfields. The result would be a picture of the past that is partial, fragmented, and skewed toward present-day concerns, leaving much of the nation’s history unexplored. But why do I, a Duke history major now in my fourth year, say this?
More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements. For starters, there are far too few American History professors who specialize in non-identitarian fields. Of the 16 professors listed under “United States & North America,” only four are credited with teaching the nation’s history through a lens not primarily shaped by identity. More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings, 46 to be exact, are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements. It’s worth asking whether such a concentrated emphasis risks narrowing the intellectual scope of historical inquiry at the expense of students and faculty.
This imbalance is especially stark when one looks at the research profile of Duke’s history faculty. Within the “United States & North America” concentration, the overwhelming focus is on race, gender, and social movements. Fields such as African American history, Latino history, and the legacies of slavery, while intellectually rich and essential in their own right, have come to dominate the department’s Americanist identity. If only four or so professors approach American history from a non-identitarian lens, one is left to wonder: What exactly is the rest of the department studying? In many cases, the answer is topics such as environmental justice, feminist historiography, and the racialized dimensions of public health. Virtually no one anchors his or her work in the traditional pillars of political, constitutional, military, or diplomatic history. The few who do are conspicuously isolated within a department whose intellectual energy lies elsewhere. Even those who might engage with broader historical questions often approach them primarily through the lens of race, identity, and power.
The recent scholarly output underscores this pattern, with publications such as “The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy,” “Juan Crow and the Erasure of Blackness in the Latina/o South,” “Crafting Queer Histories of Technology,” and “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” to name a few.
If professors of American racial- and social-justice history are this overrepresented, then what does that mean for Duke’s course offerings?
At first glance, Duke’s history curriculum appears to offer a well-rounded education in American history. Over 40 percent of the department’s courses that fall under the “United States & North America” concentration appear to carry the hallmarks of traditional survey or thematic courses one would expect at a major research university. Titles such as “Religious Freedom in America: A Legal History,” “History of American Democracy,” “The Civil War and Reconstruction: The United States, 1850-1880,” “Cold War America,” and “The Making of Modern America: The United States from 1898 to 1945” suggest a healthy commitment to broad, chronological engagement with the national past.
But a closer look reveals something else. Of the 38 courses listed in this geographic concentration and not explicitly framed through a racial, identitarian, or activist lens, only 20 actually focus on American history in any substantive way. The remaining 18 courses are scattered across subjects only tangentially related to America qua America, such as “Introduction to Oral History” and “The Foundations of Modern Terrorism.” Even the “20” figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes courses such as “The History of Gardening in North America, 1607-Present” “Book Publishing & Marketing: A Case Study of the Romance Fiction Industry,” “Sports and American Culture,” “Writing American Politics” (which seeks to “engage and analyze historical and contemporary documentary media on the Populist movement, the long civil rights movement, the modern women’s movement, [and] Black Lives Matter”), to name a few. And, to make matters worse, these few courses are rarely offered. Here is a list of all the survey American History courses on offer next semester:
“The Making of Modern America: The United States from 1898 to 1945”
By contrast, these are the American racial- and social-justice history courses offered:
“History of Latinxs in the United States”
“Gateway Seminar: Slavery and Its Afterlives”
“Introduction to Asian American History”
“Men, Women, and Sports: Topics in US Sports History”
“The Connection between Human Rights, Memory and How Societies Create Memorials”
“Immigrant Dreams, U.S. Realities: Immigration Policy History”
What else is taught in the 46 courses focused on racial- and social-justice history? Here is a brief sample: “Historicizing Whiteness,” “Racial Justice in the 20th Century US and South Africa,” “Post-Civil Rights America: The Search for Social Justice, 1968-Present,” and “White People: In Anthropological Perspective.” While some courses address particular social movements (“Latinx Social Movements,” “Theorizing Liberation: From Black Power to the Age of Trump”), others combine American history with global liberation struggles (“Teaching Race, Teaching Gender,” “Race and Society: South Africa and the US, 1890-Present”), and many others use the lens of race or gender to reframe traditionally broader topics (“The South in Black and White,” “Women, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. History”).
Why teach a class on “whiteness” when I can answer any questions you might have? My favorite of these, “White People: In Anthropological Perspective,” which is taught by a black man, always gave me a bit of a laugh when I saw its abbreviated name, “White People,” on Duke’s course directory. After all, why teach a class on us when I can answer any questions you might have?
Furthermore, the department’s American History “gateway seminars,” courses designed to introduce students, primarily freshmen, to the methodologies and questions that guide historical inquiry, further demonstrate this imbalance. Of the 12 gateway seminars concentrated on American history, six are explicitly framed around race and social justice. These include “Solidarity! Asian American Activism,” “Eyewitness to Slavery,” “The Meaning of Freedom in American History,” “Civil Rights and Asian Americans,” and “Slavery and Its Afterlives.”
Even ostensibly broader courses are described in terms that foreground identity politics or ideological critique. Even ostensibly broader courses such as “Environments in Crisis” are described in terms that foreground identity politics or ideological critique. At a minimum, this lack of topical diversity in the department’s gateway offerings suggests that Duke’s history faculty are less interested in introducing students to the full breadth of America’s past than in signaling which questions, and which answers, are worth asking.
Notably, this wasn’t always the way the Duke history department approached its work. In fact, the department’s current posture stands in stark contrast to how it understood its mission for much of its history. Back in 1997-1998, the major was framed in far more neutral, scholarly terms. The goal was to give students broad exposure to different historical fields while also allowing for deeper study in a particular time period, region, or thematic area. That intellectual pluralism showed up clearly in the course catalog. Students could take classes like “The Development of American Democracy to 1865,” “The Emergence of Modern America,” “America in International Affairs, 1607-1861,” and “The United States as a World Power, 1861-1941.” These weren’t just different in content. They reflected a fundamentally different intellectual orientation. The balance between survey courses and those built around social-justice themes was almost the reverse of what it is today. That year, the department offered 29 survey-style courses rooted in American history’s chronological and institutional development, compared to just 12 courses explicitly taught through a social-justice lens. And the methodological range was much broader: Political, diplomatic, military, and economic history stood alongside social and cultural history, rather than being eclipsed by them. The underlying goal was to illuminate the past on its own terms.
In less than 30 years, Duke’s history department has shifted from offering a balanced mix, roughly two broad survey courses for every class focused on race or social justice, to a 2025 curriculum in which traditional survey courses have taken a back seat.
What does all of this mean for incoming Duke students interested in American history? Most obviously, it means their options are severely limited. Unless one’s interests align closely with themes of race, gender, identity, or popular culture, the department offers little in the way of intellectual variety. And even the handful of broader courses available, such as “Statecraft and Strategy,” are taught not by Duke history faculty but by professors housed in the Sanford School of Public Policy. In short, the very faculty responsible for training the next generation of historians are absent from the courses that might cultivate a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the American past.
For undergraduates such as myself, who are deeply interested in American history but not solely through the prisms of slavery or identity politics, the options are startlingly dry. If you, like me, are interested in American legal or political history from the Founding to the end of Reconstruction, tough luck. But, hey, at least you can learn about gardening. A discipline that once sought to give students a panoramic view of the past, from the Federalist Papers to the Fire-Eaters, now seems content to orbit the same trite themes: identity, resistance, and marginalization. Complex historical figures are flattened, intellectual traditions are sidelined, and national turning points are jammed into neat, racially essentialist boxes.
This narrowing of scope has consequences, not just for the department’s intellectual balance but for its viability. This narrowing of scope has consequences, not just for the department’s intellectual balance but for its viability. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of primary history majors at Duke plummeted from 90 to just 22. This decline is not merely a reflection of national trends but a local indictment of how the field is being taught. While the over-specialization of historical inquiry, the collapse of the Western civilizational canon, and the dominance of activist scholarship are all longstanding issues, their cumulative effect has been to alienate students who might otherwise be drawn to the study of history. The tragedy is not that these themes are being studied but that almost nothing else is.
What’s missing is a sustained encounter with the messy, contradictory, and often inspiring ideas that have driven American history. This is not a critique of courses on race or social justice as such. These are legitimate fields of inquiry and, when taught with care, can illuminate important dimensions of the American past. The concern, rather, lies in the near-total absence of curricular balance, or, to be frank, of sustained interest in the animating ideas, institutions, and conflicts that have defined the American experiment. And what’s missing, a sustained encounter with the messy, contradictory, and often inspiring ideas that have driven American history, is not merely an oversight. It is a failure of historical imagination.
This disproportionate emphasis has come at the expense of more traditional approaches—chronological surveys, political and constitutional development, military and diplomatic history, and economic transformation—that once anchored a well-rounded historical education. To be clear, this is not a veiled call for some sort of “white history” curriculum. Rather, the concern is that these racialized lenses signal to students, especially those who do not see themselves primarily through an identity category, that their cultural inheritance, political traditions, and historical contributions are of secondary importance or, worse, only worth studying insofar as they oppress others.
To recover its purpose, Duke’s history department would do well to revisit what William F. Buckley Jr. once called “epistemological optimism”: the belief that we can, through careful inquiry, open debate, and rigorous methods, come to know real things about the past. This does not mean ignoring complexity, contingency, or the voices of those historically excluded from the record. But it does mean rejecting the idea that all historical understanding is necessarily bounded by present concerns.
There are colleges where American history is not simply a catalog of grievances or identities but the complex, sometimes flawed, but always fascinating story of a nation’s development. If Duke will not offer that education, then students must find it elsewhere.
Sherman Criner is a senior at Duke University studying public policy, history, and political science and a 2025 Martin Center intern.
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Sherman Criner
