In large measure Americans do engage with the past: They troop to Civil War battlefields and compelling historical museums. They watch New York musicals about historical figures whom previously they only vaguely recalled from the ten dollar bill. With a bit more energy they pick up books by great popular historians like David McCullough and biographers like Ron Chernow, or by academic scholars with graceful pens and vivid imaginations like James McPherson and David Hackett Fischer.

There are plenty of places to go, things to see, and books to read. But what Americans need more of is the embrace of the American past that helped them through the turmoil of the 1960’s and the sour politics and economics of the 1970’s. What is missing is, for example, the kind of writing for young people that Bennett Cerf of Random House solicited for the Landmark series that he founded in 1948, and that ran for some twenty years. He recruited top notch writers, including novelists like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, C. S. Forester, and Robert Penn Warren, and war correspondents like William Shirer, Quentin Reynolds, and Richard Tregaskis to write about epic events and personalities. It was formative reading for a lot of teens then, what a recent article in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine, Perspectives on History, called an “icon of American history.”

Patriotic history enters through historical novels as well—old standbys like Drums Along the Mohawk, or Johnny Tremaine. Nor did those novels of the last century always follow a conventional or unproblematic story line. Perhaps the best historical novelist of the 1930’s, whose grip I have never shaken, was Kenneth Roberts, whose Arundel and Rabble in Arms celebrated Benedict Arnold (pre-treason), and whose Oliver Wiswell told a sympathetic tale of the American Loyalists.

Patriotic history does not have to cover up the dark pages of the American past—the cruelties and suffering of slavery and Jim Crow, the violence and injustice of the Trail of Tears or the massacre at Wounded Knee, the corruption of Tammany Hall, the follies of the Red Scares or Charles Lindbergh’s creepy America Firstism. But patriotic histories have a way of reminding us of what there is to celebrate in the American past—as when David Hackett Fischer reminds us that George Washington broke with British military practice in abjuring the floggings that could turn into death sentences, or when James McPherson points out that, in fact, the Cause—be it preservation of the Union or hostility to slavery—really did matter to many Union soldiers.

Above all, patriotic history provides us heroes. The president, early in his tenure in office, blithered a bit about Frederick Douglass, clearly clueless about the identity let alone the greatness of a man who escaped slavery and then fought unremittingly against it. Patriotic biography gives us John Quincy Adams in every phase of his life, to include its end, when he took a lonely and principled vote on the Mexican War just before suffering a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of the House of Representatives. It gives readers Davy Crockett on the frontier and Audie Murphy at Anzio, and it also gives them Harriet Tubman rescuing men and women from bondage, or Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce fighting a hopeless fight for his people. It gives them complicated figures like Andrew Carnegie—strikebreaker and extraordinary philanthropist committed to building libraries across the country to give young people the keys to better futures.