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Laddar... Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Pastav Kevin M. Kruse (Redaktör), Julian E. Zelizer (Redaktör)
Top Five Books of 2023 (438) Laddar...
Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. This book was a wonderful mix of much of the stuff I was "taught" in school, stuff I, as a card-carrying progressive, believe, and then the stuff that I don't agree with. It was a good book to listen to, but some of the narrators did a better job than others. It would be a better book, much better imho to read as a paper text, preferable hard back. It is too difficult to search back on bits and pieces.
This collection of essays by 21 exceptional historians has an ambitious mission: the re-education of Americans assaulted by lies more systematically than any previous generation. ... There is a great deal more surprising, fact-based history in these 390 pages. In an era notorious for an attention span demolished by the internet, it is buoying indeed that a volume of this seriousness has spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
"The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Inaccurate interpretations and outright misrepresentations of the past-cultivated within and promoted by the conservative movement and right-wing media over the last several decades-hold sway among large numbers of Americans, damaging our public discourse. In Myth America, historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of historians to provide textured analysis that explains what we get wrong about the past. Drawing on their immense knowledge of scholarship and their own primary research, these contributors provide correctives to the ways conservatives distort history to serve the needs of their anti-democratic agenda. For instance: Erika Lee shows how, far from posing a relentless threat to America, immigrants have long been recruited and even coerced to come to the United States. Joshua Zeitz traces how the welfare programs of the Great Society, criticized by the right as wasteful failures, have provided millions of Americans with food security, health care, and education. Carol Anderson uncovers how racism and anxiety over the nation's changing demographics, not voter fraud, are motivating Republicans' assault on voting rights. Elizabeth Hinton reveals that, rather than curbing crime, patrolling low-income communities with outside police forces has historically intensified violence and made everyone less safe. Taken together, the essays unveil how corporate interests and right-wing politicians use bad history to fan the flames of white resentment and unravel America's social safety net. Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past"-- Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.0000History and Geography North America United States United States United States United States United StatesKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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With Myth America, Kruse and his fellow editor Julian Zelizer (also a Princeton professor) have gathered essays from noted scholars across the spectrum of American history to refute some of the pernicious myths (some might call them lies) that are repeated ad nauseam these days. The hot-button topics include myths about "American Exceptionalism," immigration in general and the American-Mexican border in particular, the success of the Depression-era New Deal social welfare programs, the claims of voter fraud that underlie ongoing efforts to curtail voting rights, the increasing violence of police interactions with communities of color, and more.
Zelizer's essay deconstructs the myth of the Reagan Revolution, while Kruse expands a topic on which he has expended many tweets: the so-called Southern Strategy that Republicans employed to attract racist white voters in the American South that over decades resulted in the complete flip of the party from the "party of Lincoln" freeing the slaves to the "party of Trump" courting white Christian nationalists.
I got my bachelor's degree in history so I found I had at least a superficial knowledge of most of the topics covered in Myth America. For me, the value was in the details, having the bare facts put into context and buttressed by plenty of hard historical evidence. Some of the topics, such as the one on "The Magic of the Marketplace," which delves into economic theory vs economic reality, were things I had heard without understanding for years, and I felt smarter for finally getting encough context to be able to understand the topic the next time it comes up in the news. But I think the authors provide enough context to allow even readers completely unfamiliar with a topic to gain an useful understanding of it.
I'm sure there will be people who dismiss this book as partisan, a piece of liberal propaganda. I found the individual arguments to be dispassionate and matter-of-fact, a welcome breath of fresh air these days. The citations of historical evidence from primary and other trusted sources provide a foundation of facts from which fair-minded individuals can start a discussion about interpretation.
I was fortunate enough to have both the ebook and the audiobook editions, and found it most effective to listen to the essays, with a break between each to process the information I learned. During that time, I would often consult the ebook to look up the footnotes and in some cases the charts and graphs referenced in the text in order to more fully understand the topic. The audiobook used several narrators who were generally fine if uninspired choices, although I was disappointed they didn't choose male narrators for the essays written by men and female narrators for the essays written by women. Instead both the male and female narrators seemed to be assigned more or less randomly. ( )