The Reagan triumph brought William Bennett as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bennett quickly made his distaste for social history known. He was quoted as dismissing a project on working-class history on grounds that workers had nothing to contribute to the real record of civilization, citing the importance of further work on Plato as the funding target of choice. For a time, in the 1980s, it was informally recommended that social history, as a specific label, be removed from NEH proposals, even when the actual content might pass muster. Bennett's successor, Lynne Cheney, eased up a bit, and some sociohistorical projects began to creep back into the funded category.(Cheney, 1989) Cheney, though now the conservative spokesperson against a variety of evils in professional historical research and teaching, continues to profess some approval of attention to diverse groups, including women, in American history. But even a bit of flexibility did not eliminate the tension between the conservative view of the past and the sociohistorical vision - a tension present also in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, when university funding cuts seriously affected social history, leaving several centers diminished.
The recent resurgence of conservative success in the United States accidentally coincided with a number of occasions for public review of what the history discipline is all about. In the autumn of 1994, after a long and laborious gestation, two sets of History Standards were issued by the National Center for History in the Schools, on United States and world history respectively. Both sets quickly drew conservative ire. Editorialists, Lynne Cheney at their head, excoriated what they termed untraditional views of the American past and the downgrading of Western civilization in the larger historical approach to the rest of the world. Radio talk show hosts, ordinary citizen letter-writers, and finally the U.S. Senate by a 99-1 majority, blasted the Standards.............
