Jonathan Barth joins us today. He is history professor at Arizona State University,

author of The Currency of Empire,

Money and Power in 17th Century, English, America. And he's also associate director of the Center for American Institutions at ASU. The center recently issued a report on the teaching of American

history and higher education in the

United States. The results of the report are our topic. Today, it's a timely one. Higher ed is so

much in the news, and of course, U.S. history is a contested field in that area. But welcome, Professor

Barth. Thank you very much for having me. First, tell us,

what does the Center for American Institutions do? Well, we are a center at Arizona State University

that's focused on revitalizing the institutions that are most essential, foundational to

what made America a great and exceptional country.

And we believe that liberty is a very precious thing, but that there are certain institutional

prerequisites for sustaining and preserving liberty that is oftentimes missing in the college classroom.

So we seek to bring that message to students and to talk about everything from civic institutions

to the family, to the military, to legal institutions, economic institutions, religion.

All of this comes together to create the foundations of a free society.

But we last year conducted a report on the teaching of American history because education is very

central to what we do. And the results probably won't shock your audience.

But essentially, well, what we did, we had a team of researchers look at publicly available syllabi for U.S. history courses.

And for those in your audience who don't know, the U.S. survey is usually divided in half.

Usually the first half goes up

to 1877, and then the second half goes from 1877 to the present day. And what we found was a

consistently negative message, the conclusion that America is a failed experiment, that it was

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