4/16/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with a piece at RealClearHistory that reflects on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Historian Brian Matthew Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a member of the Jack Miller Center’s network of scholars, argues that Lincoln’s assassination had massive repercussions for the nation as a whole. It was “the first shot of a violent counterrevolution to nullify Union victory and its consequences,” he writes. Though America today seems to be in an unprecedented state of upheaval, looking back at Lincoln’s assassination shows us that there have been flashpoints throughout our history that have been just as fraught, and sometimes even far more, than what we face today. Jordan closes by reminding us that ruminating on Lincoln’s untimely death can help show us that “we are hardly the first Americans to look to the future with a degree of disquietude.”

At The Fulcrum, Jack Miller Center President Hans Zeiger highlights the recent “promising” results of a civics survey from the Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. Zeiger says that the survey indicates “that Americans across the political spectrum still hold on to a common vocabulary for our civic life.” It shows that most Americans have a positive view of civic terms, including “freedom,” “community,” “service,” and “Constitution.” This should point us to the importance of cultivating a shared civic language that can cross partisan lines so that we can develop the shared foundation on which citizenship can thrive. “Civic education can fill a large part of this function,” Zeiger writes, “making us aware of the foundational documents, ideals and historical memory we share and teaching us methods for disagreeing respectfully.” He concludes by noting that as America approaches its 250th birthday, we all should “do our part to speak a civic language that builds up rather than tear down.”