The Whites of Their Eyes : The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History / Jill Lepore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lepore, Jill, Author.

Contributor:

O’Brien, Ruth, Contributor.

Series:

Public square (Princeton, N.J.)

The Public Square ; 16

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Tea Party movement.

Fundamentalism--United States.

Fundamentalism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 careful and concerned 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--a history of the Revolution, from the archives. 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. In a new afterword, Lepore addresses both the recent shift in Tea Party rhetoric from the Revolution to the Constitution and the diminished role of scholars as political commentators over the last half century of public debate.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword / O'Brien, Ruth

Prologue. Party Like It's 1773

1. Ye Olde Media

2. The Book of Ages

3. How to Commit Revolution

4. The Past upon Its Throne

5. Your Superexcellent Age

Epilogue. Revering America

Afterword to the Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Nov 2019)

ISBN:

9781400839810

1400839815

OCLC:

747411211