The college-level course known as Advanced Placement U.S. History, or APUSH, occupies a strange space within U.S. history education. Any effort to tell the history of the United States to the public must wrestle with two competing impulses: first, to understand our past in all its complexity, warts and all; and second, to find within our past a source of inspiration and a shared identity. K-12 curricula, especially those mandated by state governments, tend to favor the latter impulse and embrace U.S. history as a means of instilling national identity and pride. But APUSH, because of its peculiar history, embodies both impulses. The resultant tension is something that teachers, students, and parents have long had to navigate.
The origins of APUSH can be traced back to a series of talks in the late 19th century between members of the American Historical Association and the National Education Association. The focus of these talks was reconciling the history curriculum requirements of high schools and universities. While college and university instructors urged that high-school curricula reflect history as taught at the university level, secondary educators pushed for a curriculum that more directly met the needs of high-school students and prepared them for responsible citizenship. Out of these talks was born the College Entrance Examinations Board (CEEB, or simply “College Board”) in 1899.
For its first half-century, College Board was primarily focused on testing high-school students for college admissions. With the onset of the Cold War, however, education became a matter of national security. U.S. policymakers were especially interested in math and science education, so that America’s future scientists and engineers could compete with the Soviet Union; there was also, however, pressure on history curricula to build a patriotic bulwark against communism. In 1952, the Ford Foundation consulted with representatives from select universities and high schools on how to foster the development of the country’s brightest students. Participants in the study proposed what became the Advanced Placement program, which would allow students who proved subject-matter mastery to enter college with course credits. College Board took on implementation of the program, including APUSH, in 1955.
Through conferences and other events, APUSH brought together secondary and higher-education teachers and forged a new ecosystem. Exams were (and still are) scored at annual readings which possessed a “camp-like quality… a happy combination of dogged labor, special friends, and intellectual discourse.” High-school teachers sat alongside college professors and discussed U.S. history as fellow scholars, an attribute of the annual readings which College Board still uses to promote them to potential teacher applicants. Until recently, APUSH teachers were invited to submit questions for consideration by the test development committee, giving teachers a real sense of ownership in the course.