History Center Shares New Set Of Standards

By Karen Diegmueller

Timbuktu has disappeared. Pearl Harbor has ascended. George Washington is in; Eleanor Roosevelt is out. And names and places like Joseph McCarthy and Seneca Falls, N.Y., whose prominence so irked critics the last time around, have been allotted one mention apiece in the revised national history standards that were released last week.

Students exposed to the new voluntary guidelines that spell out what they should know in grades 4, 8, and 12 also will be introduced to a more uplifting history of the United States and the West.

At the same time, though, the authors have not sugarcoated the past. Episodes such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II are still...