Patriot’s History of the United States
I leafed through (actually only really read the dustjacket) A Patriot’s History to the United States at Borders. The cover, title, and for that matter subtitle, immediately give it away as a response to the famed left-wing Howard Zinn book A People’s History of the United States, a book that veers toward a sort of Manichaean Morality Lesson for America’s Left. (If it’s required for me to explain my problems with that book, I’ll get to it sometime later.)
“From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror”, eh? Columbus… them’s fighting words. Get back to Howard Zinn and it brings to mind the lecture from Portland State University circa 1992 broadcast perpetually on Public Access, wherein you see Zinn quoting a history saying (quick google search brings this up to me) “He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship.”
As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln…
The paragraph is something of a farce. I recall my fifth grade classroom, decorated on the wall with the 41 presidents — that is Washington through Bush the Better. It was undoubtedly set up in that way to encourage conversations such as happened thusly: “Kennedy kicks butt!” “No, you fool! Lincoln!!” (The textbook lesson of that year largely jumped from Washington — maybe Jefferson with the “Louisiana Purchase” — to Lincoln. To fill in the spaces and a sense of time, the teacher laid out coloring pages of all these obscuro-presidents… which was where my conversation to the conversation came in “William Henry Harrison beat them all!”)
The “Harriet Tubman” canard? There is this sense I have that the average public school student simply ain’t ever going to be President of the United States, and pretty well can come out with more on how to be an effective citizen from the life of Harriet Tubman than from any of the presidents. Note the dust-jacket line “And they conclude that America’s place as a world leader derived largely from the virtues of our own leaders.” No room for the old line “If you don’t like the news today, go out and make your own news.”
Regrettably, the inside dust jacket is not available at Amazon.com, because the final bullet-point for the book made me scoff. “Learn how, even when America fights a war for the wrong reason, America still spreads freedom.” A historical argument for the “Noble Lie”? Here, we chime in with a great debate point: “Huh? Actually, I could care less whether what’s being said is true or not… we’ll spread freedom no matter.”
Well… whatever.