From acclaimed bestselling historian Jill Lepore, the story of the
American historical mythology embraced by the far right
Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid
claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders
said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern
segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long
struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle
waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical
Christians to "take back America."
Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a
careful and concerned look at American history according to the far
right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea
Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies
curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a
Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the
eighteenth-century struggle for independencea history of the Revolution,
from the archives. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's
reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could
agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly
beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a
nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past--a time
less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty--a yearning for an
America that never was.
The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a
narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also,
finally, a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical,
and dangerously antipluralist.
In a new afterword, Lepore addresses both the recent shift in Tea Party
rhetoric from the Revolution to the Constitution and the diminished role
of scholars as political commentators over the last half century of
public debate.
