Lendol Calder THE KIDS ARE (GOING TO BE) ALRIGHT In another Progressive Era, in a different country, Nikita Khrushchev is remembered as saying, “Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully.… They can spoil everything.” We can revise Khrushchev’s observation to fit the American scene. Over here, people say it’s the history test makers who have the power to spoil everything. Since its launch last fall, the new curriculum framework for the AP U.S. History Test (APUSH) has sailed into a headwind of opposition. Conservatives complain the revised APUSH course indoctrinates students into a Holden Caulfield-like contempt for Amer- ican exceptionalism (“It’s all phony”) with lessons exaggerating what is “bad about America.” The APUSH framework has been denounced by the Republican National Committee. It has been censured by school boards in Colorado, Nebraska, and North Ca- rolina. APUSH has been threatened with defunding by lawmakers in Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Channeling the spirit of Nikita Khrushchev, conservatives believe the College Board’s history test makers are “powerful and dangerous.” Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon jockeying for a presidential run on the Republican ticket, claims the new curriculum is so “anti-American” that “most people” who complete the course will be “ready to sign up for ISIS.” 1 Meanwhile, under the media radar, others voice their own doubts about the revised APUSH program. I’ve listened to professors questioning whether the new APUSH will deepen students’ knowledge or just put a College Board stamp of approval on con- tinued ignorance. Secondary teachers legitimately wonder if it is humanly possible to pull off what APUSH expects them to do now: teach both breadth and depth, content and historical thinking. Meanwhile, it isn’t just conservatives who care about how the new course will affect the civic education of youth. So it’s no great surprise the history test makers are being watched carefully. I come to this conversation with three questions in mind. Are the revisions to AP History really changes for the better? Will the new expectations of the exam make a dif- ference in how teachers teach the course? And can the new APUSH curriculum survive politicization in the rough and tumble of the culture wars? The contributors to this forum have a lot to say on the first and second questions. In my mind, though, the second and third questions are tightly linked. So I will share some thoughts about how APUSH could be taught in an era of deep disagreements about values and the nature of history. On behalf of readers of the forum, I thank our contributors for their measured, incisive Lendol Calder, Augustana College; email: lendolcalder@augustana.edu The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015), 433–440 doi:10.1017/S153778141500016X © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era