The social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas Board of Education, which will put a conservative stamp on textbooks, was received less as a pedagogical document than as the latest provocation in America's seemingly endless culture wars. 'Why Is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?' the History News Network asked, referring to the board's recommendation that Jefferson, who coined the expression 'separation of church and state,' be struck from the list of world thinkers who inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions. Other critics were more direct: 'Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History,' was the headline of an online column for The San Francisco Chronicle. This reaction wasn't altogether surprising. The board's wrangling over the curriculum had been a spectacle for months, not least because its disputes mirrored those taking place across the nation. In mid-September, citizens showed up with firearms at tumultuous town hall meetings on health care reform, and the Tea Party movement emerged as the vehicle of conservative insurgents. The majority on the Texas board, who are also conservatives, seemed to be filtering these protests into their deliberations -- in the proposal, for instance, that students be instructed in 'the individual right to keep and bear arms; and an individual's protection of private property from government takings.' Liberals -- on the Texas board and beyond -- detected an attempt to force-feed children conservative dogma, whether it was the putative religiosity of the nation's founders, the historic contribution of the Moral Majority and Rush Limbaugh, or the elevation of John Wayne into the pantheon of patriotic heroes. In reality, this controversy is the latest version of a debate that reaches back many decades and is perhaps essential in a heterogeneous democracy whose identity has long been in flux. In the 18th century, the American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, himself an immigrant from France, catalogued the continent's bewildering mix of 'English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.' He wondered, 'What then is the American, this new man?' He concluded that in America, 'individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.' That idea was later fortified by Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of American exceptionalism, which suggested that the country was exempt from the bitter conflicts -- class, religion, imperial ambition -- that had convulsed Europe. Long afterward, amid America's own convulsions in the 1960s and '70s, the concept of a single 'race of men' looked outmoded. Didn't race mean 'white race'? And didn't 'men' exclude women? American exceptionalism might really be a form of cultural insularity. So, universities and colleges devised new programs that prompted objections as fierce as those now being made to the Texas curriculum. In 1968, when Harvard students demanded a black studies program, 'Faculty hawks warned of the fall of Harvard, and even civilization, as they knew it,' as Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller note in 'Making Harvard Modern.' Soon an ever widening range of subjects, from gay studies to feminist legal theory and anthropology, were added, in keeping with the dictates of identity politics. Some of this thinking eventually filtered to grade schools, with children now celebrating Kwanzaa and composing essays, year after year, on the 'I Have a Dream' speech. Many of the changes were liberating, but some were narrowing and erroneous -- for instance the theories espoused by Leonard Jeffries Jr., who, as head of City College's black studies department in the 1980s, lectured on the differences between African 'sun people' and European 'ice people.' Meanwhile, conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney defended syllabuses limited to the Western classics, and the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that attacks on the 'Eurocentric curriculum,' as some called it, were giving rise to 'the notion that history and literature should be taught not as disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.' In fact, Schlesinger maintained, these new courses of study might actually disserve minority students. 'If a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to use the schools to disable and handicap black Americans, he could hardly come up with anything more effective than the 'Afrocentric' curriculum,' Schlesinger wrote. Though its authors say the Texas curriculum reinforces American traditions, it may instead reflect the conservative variant of identity politics, and this could invite a similar backlash. To be fair, some of the board's recommendations aren't controversial. Most scholars of the Cold War, left and right, think that the Venona documents -- communications that record the activities of Americans who secretly spied for the Soviet Union -- illuminate the anti-Communist investigations of the McCarthy period. And historians of the conservative movement will agree that Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly are worth learning about, as are the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association. Even the Texas curriculum's most disputed item -- its assertion that the Founders envisioned America as a divinely inspired Christian nation -- is not as radical as it sounds. In 1964, in a series of lectures on America's founding documents, starting with the Mayflower Compact, the political scientist Willmoore Kendall theorized that 'the nascent society that interprets itself in the Compact is in some sense a religious, more specifically a Christian, society, which calls God in as witness to its act of founding.' Kendall teased out the implications through close readings of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. But his analysis stressed the 'symbolic' aspects of those texts, and his nuanced discussion drew on counterarguments by other scholars. In contrast, the Texas board's description of America as a 'Judeo-Christian' nation treats ideas and events that have been under continual reinterpretation and revision for decades as literal and settled truth. It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children -- not, as in the past, college students -- whose minds are being fought over today on such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of increasingly bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy. In 'The American Political Tradition,' published in 1948, the historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that the fad for popular history at the time was evidence of 'national nostalgia' -- an effort not to understand the past, but rather to evade the present. 'This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis,' he surmised. As it happens, a good deal of contemporary popular history is more critical than in Hofstadter's day. But it is presented through an ever-narrowing aperture. The late Howard Zinn's 'People's History of the United States,' depicts the United States as an epic of oppression in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden. Conversely, 'A Patriot's History of the United States,' by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, describes the New Deal as a calamity that wreaked havoc on the American economy. The two books seem to have captured the spirit of the moment; both are on The New York Times best-seller list. Both are also, in effect, counternarratives. They seek not to revise but to displace more familiar histories and are utterly different in tone from older popular histories like the Daniel Boorstin trilogy 'The Americans,' and William Manchester's two-volume work, 'The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America.' For all their dissimilarities, Boorstin and Manchester convey the impression that America, despite its diversity, is a nation whose citizens share the same essential values, at once democratic and aspirational. But to read these newer books is to inhabit two utterly different Americas that have almost nothing to say to each other. Both are conceived in a spirit of protest, and this explains their appeal at a time when protest seems the most dynamic force in politics. Half a century ago, in his essay, 'The Search for Southern Identity,' the historian C. Vann Woodward explored a parallel phenomenon, the confusion that overtook the South after the Supreme Court had invalidated segregation and the region become more urban and industrial, losing its distinctive agrarian flavor. What Southerners should do, Woodward urged, is subordinate their regional attachment to the country's 'national myths,' for instance the American 'success story' that had inspired so many others, like the European immigrants who had 'sought and found identity in them.' Southerners might do this, too, if they gave up 'the romantic dreams of the South's past.' Today it is not regional or ethnic identity, but ideological commitment that threatens to submerge larger 'national myths.' But one thing remains unchanged from 50 or 60 years ago. As Americans struggle to see where they are going, they continue to gaze fondly at the past -- and to see in it what they like. 