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The Whites Of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution And The Battle Over American HistoryStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionAmericans 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. Author descriptionJill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the "New Yorker". Her books include "New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan", a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and "The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity", winner of the Bancroft Prize. Table of contentsForeword by Ruth O'Brien ix Prologue: Party Like It's 1773 1 Chapter 1: Ye Olde Media 20 Chapter 2: The Book of Ages 43 Chapter 3: How to Commit Revolution 70 Chapter 4: The Past upon Its Throne 98 Chapter 5: Your Superexcellent Age 126 Epilogue: Revering America 152 Afterword to the Paperback Edition 167 Acknowledgments 177 Notes 179 Index 209 |