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Awards
Overview"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 wry and bemused 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 independence - the real one, that is. 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." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Jill LeporePublisher: Princeton University Press Imprint: Princeton University Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 21.60cm Weight: 0.425kg ISBN: 9780691150277ISBN 10: 0691150273 Pages: 224 Publication Date: 10 October 2010 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional and scholarly , Tertiary & Higher Education , Professional & Vocational Replaced By: 9781400839810 Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Out of Print Availability: In Print  Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock. Language: English Table of ContentsReviewsIn The Whites of Their Eyes, Lepore reviews the history of the American Revolution--in order to explore, and explode, the way the 21st-century Right uses that history. She criticizes history-according-to-the-Tea-Party on two levels. First, and unsurprisingly, she finds that the Tea Party's description of the past is simply incorrect at many turns. More interesting is Lepore's second criticism. In their asking the (unanswerable) question, 'What would the Founders do?', the Tea Party invites people to have a very strange relationship with the past: 'People who ask what the founders would do quite commonly declare that they know, they know, they just know what the founders would do, and, mostly, it comes to this: if only they could see us now, they would be rolling over in their graves. . . . We have failed to obey their sacred texts, holy writ, ' Lepore writes provocatively. 'That's not history. It's not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together. It's not ori Author Information"Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the ""New Yorker"". Her books include ""New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan"", a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and ""The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity"", winner of the Bancroft Prize." Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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