ANN APPLEBAUM IS WRITING ABOUT THE SMITHSONIAN, but the problem she describes goes much, much deeper than that:

Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn’t tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower. When the museum was built in 1964, this sort of thing probably wasn’t necessary. But judging from a group of teenagers whom I recently heard lapse into silence when asked if they could identify Lewis and Clark, I suspect it’s now very necessary indeed.

This ties in neatly with David Gelernter’s piece from last week on the schools’ failure to teach American history. It’s a problem that isn’t really about museums.