By Jill Lepore
Americans have regularly positioned the previous to political ends. The Union laid declare to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders acknowledged they have been the genuine sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This booklet tells the tale of the centuries-long fight over the which means of the nation's founding, together with the conflict waged by way of the Tea celebration, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take again America."
Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker employees author, bargains a cautious and anxious examine American heritage in response to the a ways correct, from the "rant heard around the world," which introduced the Tea get together, to the Texas institution Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the us used to be tested as a Christian kingdom. alongside the best way, she offers infrequent perception into the eighteenth-century fight for independence--a background of the Revolution, from the information. Lepore strains the roots of the some distance right's reactionary background to the bicentennial within the Nineteen Seventies, while nobody may agree on what tale a divided kingdom may still inform approximately its unruly beginnings. at the back of the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic or even heartbreaking craving for an imagined past--a time much less stricken by way of ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty--a craving for an the United States that by no means was.
The Whites in their Eyes unearths that the a long way correct has embraced a story approximately America's founding that isn't just a delusion yet is additionally, ultimately, various fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist.
In a brand new afterword, Lepore addresses either the new shift in Tea social gathering rhetoric from the Revolution to the structure and the reduced function of students as political commentators over the past part century of public debate.
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Additional info for The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (The Public Square)
Sample text
Maybe eight. She was skinny and sick and nearly naked. She was half dead. The captain wanted her off his hands. 21 That girl would one day chronicle the birth of the United States: Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write. . 22 Phillis Wheatley’s revolution began in 1761. The French and Indian War ended in 1763. The imperial coffers were empty: half of Britain’s revenues went to paying interest on the war debt. The colonies cost us this war, and the colonists should at least help pay for it, was the logic of George Grenville, the new prime minister.
1 The importance of the American Revolution to the twenty-first-century Tea Party movement might seem to have been slight—as if the name were mere happenstance, the knee breeches knickknacks, the rhetoric of revolution unthinking—but that was not entirely the case, especially in Boston, where the local chapter of the Tea Party bore a particular burden: it happened here. “Everybody in the movement is interested in the Revolution,” Hess told me. He took his debt to the founders seriously: “We believe that we are carrying on their tradition, and if they were around today, they would be in the streets with us, leading us, and they’d be even angrier than we are.
The problem wasn’t just in DC, Tuerck said. ) “It’s time for us to rally around a new cause,” Tuerck said, “which is to return America to the principles for which our forefathers fought and died. It’s time for a new American Revolution. ” Shawni Littlehale from Smart Girl Politics agreed. ” (The silent majority did no such thing. “Silent majority” used to be a euphemism for the dead. )7 Kris Mineau, an evangelical minister who heads the Massachusetts Family Institute, invoked the sage of Monticello: “I want to give you all a little history lesson.
