HS Heroes
The breakdown: three white males, three white females, one black male, and three black females, with African-Americans (including Harriet Tubman, who would not have been an obvious choice) occupying the top three spots.
The directors of the study seemed pleased with the results. Stanford’s Sam Wineburg: “over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story . . . There’s a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights.” In this narrative, Harriet Tubman is more important than Alexander Hamilton—or, for that matter, William Lloyd Garrison or William Seward or even John Brown.
As for Winfrey, Wineburg fantastically asserted that she had “a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin.” He also rejoiced that a survey of adults showed a similar list—proof that “what's studied in school affects not just children but the adults who help them with their schoolwork.”
Dennis Denenberg, whose 50 American Heroes include Jackie Joyner-Kersee but not Hamilton or Madison, nor Dwight Eisenhower, nor John Marshall (or any other Supreme Court justice, except for Sandra Day O’Connor), justified the list’s seeming imbalance on the grounds that “the Cold War is over and gone. The civil rights movement is ongoing.”
The article notes that Wineburg will summarize the study for a forthcoming JAH. The problems he identified? The list’s lack of Hispanics, Native Americans, or labor leaders. Of course.