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Author: Brian Regal
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030995380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book examines the legends of who ‘really’ discovered America. It argues that histories of America's origins were always based less on empirical evidence and more on social, political, and cultural wish fulfillment. Influenced by a complex interplay of Nativist hatred of immigrants and Aboriginal people, as well as distrust of academic scholarship, these legends ebbed and flowed with changing conditions in wider American society. The book focuses on the actions of a collection of quirky, obsessed amateur investigators who spent their lives trying to prove their various theories by promoting Welsh princes, Vikings, Chinese admirals, Neo-lithic Europeans, African explorers, and others who they say arrived centuries before Columbus. These myths acted as mitigating agencies for those who embraced them. Along with recent scholarship, this book makes extensive use of archival materials—some of which have never been employed before. It covers the period from the sixteenth century to the present. It brings together separate historiographic ideas to create a unified history rather than focusing on one particular legend as most books on the subject do. It shows how questions of who discovered America helped create the field of historical scholarship in this country. This book does not attempt to prove who discovered America, rather it tells the story of those who think they did.
Author: Brian Regal
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030995380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book
Book Description
This book examines the legends of who ‘really’ discovered America. It argues that histories of America's origins were always based less on empirical evidence and more on social, political, and cultural wish fulfillment. Influenced by a complex interplay of Nativist hatred of immigrants and Aboriginal people, as well as distrust of academic scholarship, these legends ebbed and flowed with changing conditions in wider American society. The book focuses on the actions of a collection of quirky, obsessed amateur investigators who spent their lives trying to prove their various theories by promoting Welsh princes, Vikings, Chinese admirals, Neo-lithic Europeans, African explorers, and others who they say arrived centuries before Columbus. These myths acted as mitigating agencies for those who embraced them. Along with recent scholarship, this book makes extensive use of archival materials—some of which have never been employed before. It covers the period from the sixteenth century to the present. It brings together separate historiographic ideas to create a unified history rather than focusing on one particular legend as most books on the subject do. It shows how questions of who discovered America helped create the field of historical scholarship in this country. This book does not attempt to prove who discovered America, rather it tells the story of those who think they did.
Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140084455X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
From celebrated writer Jill Lepore, a literary and political history of American origin stories In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories—from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address—to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression. From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.
Author: Edward J Larson
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541646029
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century's most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic Summer for the Gods -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History -- is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. An afterword assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.
Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
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 independence--a 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.
Author: Jennifer Raff
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 153874970X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas. ORIGIN is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. ORIGIN provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution. 20,000 years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed southward into what is now called the Americas. Until we venture out to other worlds, this remains the last time our species has populated an entirely new place, and this event has been a subject of deep fascination and controversy. No written records—and scant archaeological evidence—exist to tell us what happened or how it took place. Many different models have been proposed to explain how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the thousands of years that followed. A study of both past and present, ORIGIN explores how genetics is currently being used to construct narratives that profoundly impact Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It serves as a primer for anyone interested in how genetics has become entangled with identity in the way that society addresses the question "Who is indigenous?"
Author: Nicholas Hagger
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1780289529
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The widely accepted story of the founding of America is that The Mayflower delivered the first settlers from Plymouth to the New World in 1620. Yet in reality, the Jamestown settlers had already become the first English-speaking outpost thirteen years earlier in 1607. The Secret Founding of America introduces these two groups of founders - the Planting Fathers, who established the earliest settlements along essentially Christian lines, and the Founding Fathers, who unified the colonies with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - and it argues that the new nation, conceived in liberty, was the Freemasons' first step towards a new world order. Drawing on original findings and an in-depth understanding of the political and philosophical realities of the time, historian Nicholas Hagger charts the connections between Gosnold and Smith, Templars and Jacobites, and secret societies and libertarian ideals. He also explains how the influence of German Illuminati worked on the constructors of the new republic, and shows the hand of Freemasonry at work at every turning point in America's history, from Civil War to today's global struggles for democracy.
Author: David Vine
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.
Author: Adam Winkler
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393077411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
"Gunfight" promises to be a seminal work in its examination of America's four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. Winkler uses the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital, as a springboard for a groundbreaking historical narrative.
Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115399X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Examines the origins of dozens of writings, speeches, and other printed pieces from American history--from paper ballots and the Constitution to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.
Author: Ronald Takaki
Publisher: eBookIt.com
ISBN: 1456611062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 787
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Book Description
Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.
