Many state legislatures have passed laws banning the teaching of “critical race theory,” even though most legislators don’t know what it is. Many have banned the use of “The 1619 Project,” which puts the African-American experience at the center of U.S. history. Many have prohibited teaching “divisive concepts,” which presumably means anything controversial. The people passing these laws say they want “patriotic history,” the kind they learned as children, where America was the land of the free and brave, where nothing bad ever happened and all the heroes were white men.

History, think the Neanderthals, is a list of facts and battles and names to be memorized and recited.

But, writes Peter Greene, that’s not history at all. History, he writes, is a conversation.