Why American History Is Not What They Say

Why American History Is Not What They Say

Author: Jeff Riggenbach

Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1610163044

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"Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation's high schools and colleges"--Page 4 of cover.


Propaganda 1776

Propaganda 1776

Author: Russ Castronovo

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0199354901

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Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda. Truth, clarity, and honesty were declared virtues of the period - but rumors, falsehoods, forgeries, and unauthorized publication were no less the life's blood of liberty. Looking at famous patriots like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine; the playwright Mary Otis Warren; and the poet Philip Freneau, Castronovo provides various anecdotes that demonstrate the ways propaganda was - contrary to our instinctual understanding - fundamental to democracy rather than antithetical to it. By focusing on the persons and methods involved in Revolutionary communications, Propaganda 1776 both reconsiders the role that print culture plays in historical transformation and reexamines the widely relevant issue of how information circulates in a democracy.


Bye Bye, Miss American Empire

Bye Bye, Miss American Empire

Author: Bill Kauffman

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2010-07-10

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1933392800

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This book "traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power"--P. [4] of cover.


The Dominion of War

The Dominion of War

Author: Fred Anderson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2005-11-29

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 1101118792

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Americans often think of their nation’s history as a movement toward ever-greater democracy, equality, and freedom. Wars in this story are understood both as necessary to defend those values and as exceptions to the rule of peaceful progress. In The Dominion of War, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton boldly reinterpret the development of the United States, arguing instead that war has played a leading role in shaping North America from the sixteenth century to the present. Anderson and Cayton bring their sweeping narrative to life by structuring it around the lives of eight men—Samuel de Champlain, William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. This approach enables them to describe great events in concrete terms and to illuminate critical connections between often-forgotten imperial conflicts, such as the Seven Years’ War and the Mexican-American War, and better-known events such as the War of Independence and the Civil War. The result is a provocative, highly readable account of the ways in which republic and empire have coexisted in American history as two faces of the same coin. The Dominion of War recasts familiar triumphs as tragedies, proposes an unconventional set of turning points, and depicts imperialism and republicanism as inseparable influences in a pattern of development in which war and freedom have long been intertwined. It offers a new perspective on America’s attempts to define its role in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.


When Presidents Lie

When Presidents Lie

Author: Eric Alterman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2005-10

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780143036043

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Assesses the impact of governmental and presidential lies on American culture, revealing how such lies become ever more complex and how such deception creates problems far more serious than those lied about in the beginning.


Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints

Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints

Author: Alan Knight

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-05

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1496229428

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In seven substantial essays, previously unpublished, Alan Knight offers a distinct perspective on several overarching themes in Latin American history, spanning approximately two centuries, from 1800 to 2000.


Truth in History

Truth in History

Author: Oscar Handlin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 618

ISBN-13: 1351301020

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Like scholars in other fields, historians have long occupied themselves in self-justification. In a society which calibrates all measures by a single standard, the proof of scientific worth became relevance, which in turn was interpreted as a search not for truth but for political correctness. In a blistering professional critique of this tendency in academic scholarship, perhaps the first of its kind, Oscar Handlin offers an analysis that, if anything, has grown more pertinent over the past decade. In seventeen chapters, written with the brilliant assurance of a master craftsman, Handlin shows why the turn to partisanship and meaning has undermined the calling of historical research. As his new introduction makes clear, partisanship has taken the best and brightest from the field into different callings. Both widely heralded upon its initial appearance as well as attacked with vigor, Truth in History emanates from a half-century's experience of reading, writing, teaching, researching, and publishing in history and related disciplines. The passage of time has only confirmed the concerns of Handlin and the accuracy of his predictions for the field. This book will be valuable for sociologists, economists, political scientists, and historians. It is a must read for those who contemplate a life of scholarship in liberal arts.


Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men

Author: Jeffrey Hummel

Publisher: Open Court

Published: 2013-12-10

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0812698436

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Combines a sweeping narrative history of the Civil War with a bold new look at the war's significance for American society. Professor Hummel sees the Civil War as America's turning point: simultaneously the culmination and repudiation of the American revolution. A unique feature of the book is the bibliographical essays which follow every chapter. Here the author surveys the literature and points out where his own interpretation fits into the continuing clash of viewpoints which informs historical debate on the Civil War.


Strategic Terror

Strategic Terror

Author: Beau Grosscup

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1848137842

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Presenting a global history of aerial bombardment, this book shows how certain European powers initiated aerial bombardment of civilians after World War I, and how it was an instrument of choice in World War II. Beau Grosscup shows that such methods, used initially as a means of terrorizing native populations in Africa and the Middle East, have become the primary form of terrorism in more recent decades. While such 'strategic terror' is not classed as 'terrorism' in the West, this reflects an unwillingness to confront the human costs and immorality of aerial bombardment. Grosscup argues that if terrorism is to be diminished, the role of aerial bombing in sustaining global violence must be recognized.


Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet

Author: Bill Kauffman

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1684516730

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The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us—if he is known at all—as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman's rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers' intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy. In Martin's view, the Constitution was the tool of a counterrevolution aimed at reducing the states to ciphers and at fortifying a national government whose powers to tax and coerce would be frightening. Martin delivered the most forceful and sustained attack on the Constitution ever levied—a critique that modern readers might find jarringly relevant. And Martin's post-convention career, though clouded by drink and scandal, found him as defense counsel in two of the great trials of the age: the Senate trial of the impeached Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase and the treason trial of his friend Aaron Burr. Kauffman's Luther Martin is a brilliant and passionate polemicist, a stubborn and admirable defender of a decentralized republic who fights for the principles of 1776 all the way to the last ditch and last drop. In remembering this forgotten founder, we remember also the principles that once animated many of the earliest—and many later—American patriots.