The United States is the only country on Earth whose identity is bound up in documents. Since the Founding era, Americans have referred to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other seminal texts as lode stars for what it means to be a member of this nation. America, optimists assert, is a credal nation. These texts spill over into how we understand our history, a debate that has surged to the forefront of the national conversation in this era of reckoning with our past.

History is so vast and complex that to boil down our historiography into a divide between two competing camps would be almost polemical. Our understanding of our past has evolved along with our society–first a romantically infused narrative of destiny, then a clash of economic forces, then schoolbook nationalism, then the identity-oriented “revisionism” of the so-called New Historians (though revisionism is a loaded term typically deployed by right-of-center critics). But for the purposes of today, it will suit us to delineate two major sides, the nationalists and the reformers.

Nationalists view America as a world-historical triumph. They center the historical drama on brave settlers and the clairvoyant founders who turned a backwater colony into the greatest power the world has ever known. They believe in–and expect–an uncomplicated patriotism, a pride in history. In their telling, American human rights abuses, whether in the form of slavery or Cold-War coups, do not override the driving greatness of our national story. Overall, they tend to echo Herodotus’s vision of History as an archiving of great deeds. We are a good and great nation, and we owe the people who built it our lasting gratitude.

Because all history is political, the nationalists’ view has implications for how Americans should understand their place in the country. We are the inheritors of a deep heritage of national success. Americans should draw inspiration from the exploits of heroes ranging from Francis Marion to Martin Luther King, jr., and love their country with minimal equivocation. The basic overarching structure of this construct is one of old-school patriotism. To bring it back around to the Founding documents, those texts are almost sacred.

Reformers believe that the nationalist view is blind to a long history of moral failure. In their most potent form, they allege that America was built on the twin evils of slavery and genocide. They point out that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the annihilation of American Indians were two of the 10 deadliest atrocities ever committed by human beings against each other. It is undeniable that those travesties were central to our national development.

The reformers, though, differ from far-left historians like Howard Zinn in that they see a persistent silver lining of redemption in our trauma-flecked national history. At every point in this history of misdeeds, someone has raised the banner of conscience. Bartolome de las Casas spoke out against slavery and the abuse of Indigenous people in Spanish-controlled Hispaniola. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman resisted chattel slavery. The African American civil rights movement, the Native movement, and the women’s movement challenged white patriarchy in the twentieth century. It is from these moral crusaders that we should draw lessons for being Americans.

Reformers want Americans to understand their country not as a blood-and-soil configuration of the white Christian tribe, but as an ongoing project to vindicate the ideal of equality. They emphasize that American virtue has often been hollow in the face of racial aggression and call Americans to be better than the worst parts of their past. In a sense, the reformers are actually more moralistic than the nationalists, even though the nationalists consider themselves the keepers of a great spiritual tradition.

Both the reformers’ and the nationalists’ have deep roots in American history. Nationalists controlled the dominant narrative for much of our history up until the explosion of New-Historian scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s–and it took a while for the popular narrative to internalize ’60s revisions. But the reformer narrative has equally deep roots going back to the great American tradition of jeremiads delivered by such moralists as Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. Contrary to right-wing polemicists, reformer history is as deeply American as nationalist faith. The coming years will see a battle between reformers and nationalists for the steering wheel of our national narrative. The stakes are as high as history.