From the Nominator

"In the aftermath of the 2020 election, as partisan venom and conspiracy theories curdled into a revolt on Capitol Hill that would soon set off yet another bitter disagreement—was it a seditious “insurrection,” or a patriotic uprising?—historian Jonathan Zimmerman was sure of one thing: “There’s no other way to interpret our moment other than as an epic failure of education.”   

When Zimmerman, a historian of education at University of Pennsylvania, looks at the United States, he sees a republic that has lost the ability to understand itself. “And the only institution that has even a chance of intervening in that,” he contends, “is a school.”  

This article is a profile of a rare bird in contemporary academia: an outspoken critic of Confederate apologists, climate-change deniers, and right-wing “education reformers” who also specializes in yanking the rug out from under self-satisfied liberals—whether by complicating oversimplified debates about Christopher Columbus or pointing out the downsides of the identity-politics approach to school textbooks.  

Tracing Zimmerman’s wide-ranging scholarship and his own eccentric educational background, which includes his boyhood attendance at a Catholic girls school in India, this piece examines the culture wars raging in U.S. history classrooms.   

“We have radically different understandings of America right now,” Zimmerman observes. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is we don’t actually have venues and institutions to deliberate those differences … And our educational institutions have not stepped into that challenge."

From the Judges

This was a fantastic piece, through and through—that exquisite mix of a timely and important topic, told in a masterful way. It was a long piece, but all of us could have kept reading. A wonderful model of what a long-form profile piece should be.