Founding Myths

Founding Myths

Author: Ray Raphael

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2014-07-04

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 159558949X

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First published ten years ago, award-winning historian Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths has since established itself as a landmark of historical myth-busting. With the author’s trademark wit and flair, Founding Myths exposes the errors and inventions in America’s most cherished tales, from Paul Revere’s famous ride to Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. For the seventy thousand readers who have been captivated by Raphael’s eye-opening accounts, history has never been the same. In this revised tenth-anniversary edition, Raphael revisits the original myths and explores their further evolution over the past decade, uncovering new stories and peeling back additional layers of misinformation. This new edition also examines the highly politicized debates over America’s past, as well as how school textbooks and popular histories often reinforce rather than correct historical mistakes. A book that “explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation” (National Public Radio), this revised edition of Founding Myths will be a welcome resource for anyone seeking to separate historical fact from fiction.


The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Author: Bernard Bailyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0674076664

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To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, ”Fulfillment,” as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation’s ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital present concerns.


Inventing the Loyalists

Inventing the Loyalists

Author: Norman James Knowles

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780802079138

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Showing that the past is often written into present concerns, and that many groups in Ontario, both powerful and disempowered, have invoked the experience of the Loyalists, Knowles significantly revises earlier interpretations of the Loyalist tradition.


The Study of History

The Study of History

Author:

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 9780719018817

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The chief objective of this text is to provide a handy reference guide for teachers, students and researchers of modern European economic and social history. Since the bibliography covers only works written in the English language it will probably be of less use to the last named group, at least insofar as those within it are already seasoned researchers on a particular country or topic. However, it would have been quite impossible from the point of view of length to have included all the literature in foreign languages, while to have done so would have defeated the essential aim of the volume, namely that of providing a reasonably convenient guide for those who teach and study the subject but who are not primarily specialists in the field.


The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth

Author: Eileen K. Cheng

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0820330736

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American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.


Telling the Truth about History

Telling the Truth about History

Author: Joyce Appleby

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-02-14

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0393078914

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"A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."—Booklist