As George Orwell noticed, “Who controls the past controls the future.” And with out a correct understanding of the occasions that make up the previous, we could also be simply misled. In Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, distinguished historians supply keenly insightful essays that reveal the true and usually advanced historical past of America. Edited by Princeton University historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, the guide’s chapters vary from “American Exceptionalism” and “Vanishing Indians” to “Confederate Monuments” and “Voter Fraud.”
Contributor David A. Bell factors out that “the stories that nations tell themselves . . . change over time, and America has had a bewildering and contradictory plethora of them.” For instance, Erika Lee discusses the advanced realities and deep roots of the “they keep coming” immigration delusion, which asserts that the federal authorities gained’t cease the supposed thousands and thousands of individuals who enter the nation with out documentation. Sarah Churchwell exhibits how “America First has never been—and was never intended to be—a simple statement of patriotic self-interest.” Glenda Gilmore challenges the parable that the civil rights demonstrations from 1955 to 1968 have been considerably completely different from those who happened through the Eighteen Nineties by way of the Nineteen Fifties.
Michael Kazin relates the 1825 go to of Robert Owen, a wealthy producer from Wales, who delivered two addresses to joint classes of Congress. The viewers included a number of Supreme Court justices, in addition to outgoing president James Monroe and incoming president John Quincy Adams. Owen proposed the institution of a system of society based mostly on justice and kindness. He condemned America’s financial system as egocentric and inhumane, and he and his concepts have been handled with nice respect. Owen referred to as his proposal “socialism.” As Kazin writes, “Their curiosity was a sign that the market system, for all its promise of plenty, was not yet a settled reality defended by all men of wealth and standing.”
The guide’s editors are conscious that they haven’t coated each delusion in U.S. historical past, however these essays nonetheless reach bringing necessary details to our present historic debates. The footnotes alone make nice studying. Myth America is a crucial step towards a greater understanding of our historical past.
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