For a decade now, much of the nation has approached each presidential contest convinced that “democracy is on the ballot” or that we’re in the midst of a “Flight 93 election.” This catastrophism has exacerbated tribalism, distorted journalism, and squeezed out measured discussion of public policy. It’s also spilled over into schools and colleges, where tried-and-true virtues like civility get dismissed as inadequate in the face of imminent catastrophe.

This corruption of education is particularly troubling, not only because teachers and professors can morph into merchants of calamity but because schools and colleges are places where we should cultivate perspective. After all, while it’s easy to forget in the vortex of a 24-7 social-media culture, this fall is hardly the first time that things have looked bleak.

Forgetting that (or never learning it) can cause us to lose our bearings, especially when we compare our imperfect world to the one promised by attention-seeking shriekers on Fox or MSNBC. That’s the context in which I finally got around to reading Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Larson’s A Magnificent Catastrophe, an account of the 1800 presidential election that’s been sitting on my shelf for many years. It’s a stark reminder that those who insist ours is a uniquely perilous age might benefit from reflecting on days past.

First Lady Abigail Adams denounced Jefferson for embracing “ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles”; Jefferson, in turn, slammed her husband’s 1799–1800 quasi-war with France as “insane.” Meanwhile, George Washington worried that Jefferson (his former secretary of state) and the Republicans were Jacobins enamored of mob rule. In 1799, tapped by Congress to deliver the eulogy at Washington’s funeral, Virginia’s Henry Lee lamented that the young nation had lost its indispensable man at a time “when the civilized world shakes to its center.”

There was fake news, too. Pro-Jefferson newspapers falsely blamed the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte on British machinations and charged that the Anglophile Federalists would support a replay in the U.S. More generally, newspapers were fiercely partisan, especially since they depended on largesse from political allies for critical financial and editorial support.

Convinced that his opponents wished to turn the young nation into a monarchy and the Senate into a hereditary House of Lords, Jefferson fretted that the Federalists were seeking an “act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office during life” and would later arrange “the transfer of the succession to his heirs and the establishment of the senate for life.” He feared, in other words, that democracy itself was on the ballot.

In 1800, there was not yet a Twelfth Amendment—meaning electors didn’t vote for a presidential ticket. Instead, each elector just voted for two candidates; the individual with the majority of electoral votes would be president, and the runner-up would be VP. This meant that the two putative presidential candidates (Jefferson and Adams) had to worry about whether they’d wind up tied with (or losing to) their nominal number twos.

In the end, the election was a tie—not between Jefferson and Adams, but between Jefferson and his number two: Aaron Burr. That threw the election into the House of Representatives, where Jefferson needed to win nine of the 16 state delegations. He had eight. Fearing the Federalists would cling to power by refusing to choose a winner or resurrecting the Articles of Confederation, Jefferson threatened “resistance by force and incalculable consequences.” Rumors spread that Republican states would secede and form a new government. The country was barely a dozen years old and there already loomed the threat of civil war.

The Federalists eventually backed Burr, judging Jefferson an unhinged revolutionary but Burr a pragmatist with whom they could do business. As Larson recalls, less than two weeks before the critical House vote, “Lawmakers were in no mood to compromise, or even to act rationally.” Over the course of a week, the House cast 35 ballots—each one resulting in tallies of Jefferson 8, Burr 6, and split 2. Eventually, seeing no other way forward, the Federalists caved and abstained on the 36th ballot, allowing Jefferson to claim a victory they viewed as catastrophic.

Well. First off, I think it’s fair to say that few high school or college classes wade into this history today. When students do encounter the years between 1789 and the Civil War, there’s a good chance they’re either getting some version of the Howard Zinn/1619 Project approach (learning about a clubby conspiracy of like-minded white guys); or a romanticized paean in which Adams and Jefferson are plaster saints of an impossibly noble cast. Either approach—reducing history to nefarious misdeeds or imagining it as Eden before the fall—relegates us to the role of unworthy heirs. Neither is designed to foster reflective citizens or prepare students for our real challenges.

Viewing everything through the lens of the here-and-now is both misleading and a recipe for despair. Wading into the messy complexities of history can be a healthy antidote. After all, for all the craziness and enmity of 1800, things turned out okay. Adams and Jefferson eventually had a rapprochement. Back then, the entire nation viewed one or the other as evil incarnate. Today, we view them as moral and intellectual giants.

Our institutions are designed to take a lot of sharp elbows. After all, as Jefferson noted in his inaugural remarks, “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” It was Federalist senator and signer of the Declaration of Independence Gouverneur Morris who wryly observed, “When people have been drinking long enough, they’ll get sober.”

This history is important for adults to know, students to learn, and citizens to contemplate. The lessons of 1800 don’t provide easy answers to today’s challenges. But they may offer a healthful reminder that challenges frequently described as novel aren’t necessarily all that new and that we’ve survived rough waters before. Recognizing this can provide perspective. It can provide insight. It can provide wisdom. After all, if anyone had cause for catastrophism, it was John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who’d just fought a war for independence and feared that all their labors had been for nothing. Perhaps the very act of teaching that and helping students reflect upon it would temper some of the frenzied distress that’s come to infuse our very online world.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”