To outsiders, disputes within the historical discipline often seemed prosaic. But the history debates of the late twentieth century reverberated beyond the ivory tower. This was the result of contradictory factors. Because Americans were arguably more invested in the past than ever before, professional historians were granted large platforms from which to disseminate their expertise. Nevertheless, the gulf between how professional historians explained the nation’s history and how most Americans understood it grew to immense proportions. Sheltered by academic freedom, historians were relatively unconstrained in investigating the past in ways that complicated the traditional narrative of American exceptionalism. But most Americans continued to learn about the nation’s past, in schools, museums, national parks, and movies, as they always had, as a tale of national greatness and unbroken progress. Most Americans did not follow the historical discipline’s social and cultural turns. When professional historians sought to interject these new forms of historical knowledge into the public world beyond the ivory tower—when they sought to extend their scholarship into museums and into the school curriculum—a clash of cultures ensued, a clash that meshed with the wider culture wars. The history wars did not alter intellectual life within the historical discipline in any significant fashion other than giving historians added fodder for their teaching and scholarship. Historiographic debate, after all, had long been the lifeblood of professional history. But beyond the academy, the history wars mattered. Powerful conservative interests with little respect for academic norms vigorously contested academic knowledge that challenged normative America.