audiobook Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam; the State; and Public Space by John R. Bowen in History

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 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.