Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.
William Hogeland, author of The Whiskey Rebellion, is out with a new one from MIT Press called Inventing American History. Given the interest and knowledge of American history revealed by some of the comments sections I've been reading here this week, I thought you might get a kick out of Hogeland's premise and conclusions – as well as some of the gems I've pulled from the text itself.
Hogeland makes the case that our historians tend to get history wrong, and for very specific reasons. He's most annoyed (and intrigued) by our deification of people when they die, or when their historical personae are resurrected.
It's good stuff, and readily applicable whenever a Reagan funeral or something like it comes along.
Neo-Hamiltonians have been chopping up the past to make it conform to their political aims. Alexander Hamilton's national vision and founding economics are far more troubling–so more compelling–than his promoters acknowledge … Hamilton is routinely credited for favoring a strong executive branch. What he really favored was an executive branch run by him, strong enough to do anything it deemed in the national interest. For Hamilton, personal and military force, unrestrained by the slightest consideration of law, were joined ineluctably to American wealth, American unity, and America modernity. "
or
"William F. Buckley and Pete Seeger share — along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds — a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable: Seeger's Stalinism, Buckley's racism. Yet these two men–their careers strangely linked in the hunt for communists, the struggle for equal rights, and the emerging 'culture wars' of the postwar era–are worthy of consideration without air-brushing."
