In recent decades, agendas adopted by professional scholars investigating American history, have often seemed quite loosely connected to the enterprise of educating the American people about their past. Despite controversy over other aspects of its work, the National History Standards Project, through its emphatic commitment to rigorous standards in 'historical thinking,' will call forcefully upon school teachers to help their students become their own historians. This national challenge, in conjunction with other collaborative efforts, may in turn present professional scholars with important opportunities to encourage and guide development of critical and interpretive competence among the wide variety of people-teachers, artists, creative writers, film makers, broadcasters, and many others-who mediate between what historians do as scholars and what the public learns about its history.