book review myth america

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Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation

Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsense

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.

The editors are two Princeton history professors, Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer. They begin with a concise history of how we reached this zenith of misinformation.

The assault on truth by a rightwing “media ecosystem” began with Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News, augmented in recent years by even more fantasy-based cable networks like Newsmax and One America News.

The shamelessness of these sham journalists was best summarized by lawyers defending the most successful one, Tucker Carlson, in a suit accusing him of slander. The preppy anchor’s statements “ cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts ”, they said, because he so obviously engages in “ non-literal commentary ”.

Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.

Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”

These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”

The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.

The essays in Myth America attack rightwing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.

In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman , a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)

Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.

The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just deserts”.

A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor , which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.

The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.

Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.

Written by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt , who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.

The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.

Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”.

Goldwater was crushed by Johnson but as well as his native Arizona, he carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

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.

Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past is published in the US by Basic Books

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In ‘Myth America,’ historians set out to battle misinformation

While setting the record straight about the past, these essays also point to the malleability of how we think about history.

There is no escaping the long shadow that history has cast over contemporary American life. Whether Supreme Court justices jockeying over the original intent of the Founding Fathers, universities probing how much of their wealth derived from slavery, public officials removing memorials to white supremacists or school boards debating the content of history curriculums, we are daily reminded of how much the past shapes the present and inevitably the future. A new book edited by a distinguished team of Princeton historians — Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, who previously co-authored “ Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 ” — sets out to interrogate what they claim has been the alarming rise of an “age of disinformation,” a deliberate effort to distort facts to advance right-wing myths: “narratives about the past [that make it] … impossible to imagine futures that are substantially different.” Not surprisingly, they locate the most pernicious warriors against the truth in the Trump administration, and the Republican Party more broadly, aided by a conservative media ecosystem. That effort culminated in the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission report, released in the final days of the Trump White House with no American historian among the authors, to provide a national history that would promote “patriotic education.” Kruse and Zelizer dismiss it instead as propaganda that values “feeling good over thinking hard” and “celebration over complex understanding.”

This recent attack on truth motivated Kruse and Zelizer to assemble 20 essays in a volume with the somewhat sensationalist title “ Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past .” That grandiose billing aside, the book brings together outstanding historians who draw on rich, often surprising recent research by themselves and others to present a much more complicated and less congratulatory picture of many of the most contentious issues in the nation’s history. Moreover, these essays treat readers to wonderfully accessible, jargon-free historical writing.

We learn from Akhil Reed Amar about the flaws alongside the strengths of the Constitution, from Sarah Churchwell that Donald Trump’s “America First” goes back to the 1850s as a marker more of discord than of unity against foreign enemies, and from Geraldo Cadava that for much of American history the border was a site of connection rather than illegality. Karen Cox links the current conflicts over removing Confederate monuments to the “Lost Cause” rationale for the Civil War that can be traced back as far as the war’s end. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela exposes how, despite the frequent charge that feminism is anti-family, from its origins in temperance and abolitionism through to suffrage and the founding of the National Organization for Women most feminists have defended the traditional family.

Several essays take up myths related to post-World War II party politics and racial activism. Kruse dismantles the belief that Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign invented the Southern Strategy by tracing it back to the Dixiecrat split with the Democrats in 1948. Zelizer shows that the Reagan Revolution, so often touted as the death knell for liberalism, was “more of a political talking point than a description of reality.” Glenda Gilmore conveys how the myth of the civil rights movement as “The Good Protest” — succeeding through passivity — distorts the truth and has been deployed to vilify more recent demonstrators for racial equality as “lawless.” Relatedly, Elizabeth Hinton disputes popular assumptions that protest violence always starts with the protesters and argues instead that ever since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime of 1965 militarized law enforcement, the police have been the instigators. Lawrence Glickman explores how White backlash has repeatedly been justified on the grounds that protesters are going “too fast.” Carol Anderson traces the current manufactured hysteria around voter fraud back to the days of Jim Crow in the South, but also to the Northern cities where Blacks increasingly voted.

Interestingly, almost all of the essays depart in a significant way from the premise laid out by Kruse and Zelizer — that trafficking in untruths and spinning myths about the past in service of a political agenda are products of the Trump years. Rather, almost every essay documents how deeply embedded these myths have been in American history. David Bell’s examination of American Exceptionalism shows how, rather than a time-honored truth about the country, it was an idea created during the early 20th century and recast “at different moments and for different reasons, serving the needs of different constituencies.” Ari Kelman documents how the mythology of the American continent as a blank slate, absent of Indians, arrived with the first settlers. Erika Lee claims that Trump’s anti-immigration rant that “they keep coming” has a long history, consistently overlooking decades of American recruitment of immigrants to make the nation an agricultural and industrial powerhouse. Daniel Immerwahr refutes America’s idealized self-image of having avoided an empire; he insists we had one from the very start.

Other essays disprove common tropes of current political discourse. Michael Kazin argues that far from being considered un-American, socialist ideas have persisted for two centuries within mainstream politics. Eric Rauchway supports this point by showing that the recurrent repudiation of the New Deal as a failed experiment in progressive big government belies the facts; Joshua Zeitz refutes a similar charge about the Great Society. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway reject the mythological “magic of the marketplace” that supposedly has proved more effective than government. And Kathleen Belew dismisses as wishful thinking the claim made about the Jan. 6 , 2021, insurrection that “this is not who we are,” by documenting a century of assaults by white supremacists.

After reading these essays, it is hard not to conclude that mythmaking has long been a part of U.S. history. To some extent, all nations indulge, constructing usable pasts that reinforce desired social values and political goals. But there may be reasons that mythmaking has been particularly powerful in the United States. A country without any one ethno-religious underpinning may rely more on invented narratives for national identity. Moreover, the American tradition of keeping the federal government out of education, both as a funder and a standard setter, may help to propagate myths. Instead, schooling has been left to localities or, when there’s a higher authority, to a state, as well as to the private marketplace of textbook publishers that inevitably cater to their school district purchasers. In fact, years before the controversy over the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which explored the centrality of slavery to American history, an effort in the 1990s to set national standards for K-12 history teaching ended in disaster. A contest between “Great Man history” and one more inclusive of overlooked groups resulted in a destructive culture war before the whole enterprise was abandoned. The ceding of control over curriculum content to localities has minimized professional accountability and granted authority to those using history to promote special interests.

To the extent that Kruse and Zelizer are right to note that historical mythmaking has grown in recent years, it may be a result of the retreat from teaching history. When I checked the recommendations for applicants to my home institution, Harvard — arguably among the most demanding in college admissions — I discovered a request for four years of English, mathematics, a single foreign language and science, and only two years of history, with some encouragement to take a third.

The cost of devaluing the teaching of history has become increasingly obvious. Survey after survey documents Americans’ shocking lack of historical knowledge and understanding: Only 1 in 3 could pass the U.S. citizenship test, made up of basic questions. Half of Americans believe that the Civil War took place before the American Revolution. Less than a third can describe Reconstruction. Nearly half do not comprehend the three branches of government. And so on. Without any reservoirs of historical knowledge to draw on, Americans are vulnerable to untruths, disinformation and myths.

But this book points to a still deeper problem. As the authors of these excellent essays carefully track how popular mythologies about the past have been invented, refined and redefined to serve particular moments, they hint at something very important that challenges to some extent the framing of this book as a contest between truths and untruths, myths and realities. Historians recognize, and sophisticated teachers of history impart to their students, that history is not only about facts. It is also about interpretations, and those interpretations shift over time as the perspectives of historians change. Fresh documentary sources are discovered, methodologies of analysis evolve, the current moment inspires different kinds of questions and in turn new answers. One could argue, therefore, that the real challenge for Americans is not to strive to substitute “what actually happened” for some mythological rendering of the past but to recognize that history is always a construction where the present meets the past, even as it never abandons the responsibility to stay as true as possible to the best available evidence. The job of the critical citizen, then, is to learn to recognize how and when biases are shaping our history — to gain the tools for analysis, not just a set of pat answers. That may be the most crucial historical truth that Americans should aspire to learn.

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones professor of American studies at Harvard University. She is the author, most recently, of “ Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age ,” which won the 2020 Bancroft Prize in American History.

Myth America

Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

Edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer

Basic. 392 pp. $32

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The Habit America’s Historians Just Can’t Give Up

If fact-checking could fix us, we’d be a utopia by now..

The historians are concerned. We now live in a post-truth world, one in which “alternative facts” hold freight while inconvenient truths can be dismissed as “fake news.” In this “age of disinformation,” as Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer characterize it, nefarious actors distort the historical record without compunction. The vanishingly thin line between fact and fiction, truth and untruth, Kruse and Zelizer insist, sits at the center of the interlocking political crises in which Americans now find themselves.

Now Kruse and Zelizer have assembled some of their most esteemed colleagues to set the record straight. Their new edited collection, Myth America , looks to debunk certain “legends and lies” about the American past—from the idea that “the framers believed in ‘republics’ but disdained ‘democracy’ ” (dismantled in an essay by Akhil Reed Amar) to the notion that activists used “good” (mild and inoffensive) protest tactics during the Black freedom struggle of the mid-20 th century (handled in a piece by Glenda Gilmore). Only by grappling with the past as it actually happened, Kruse and Zelizer assert, can Americans “understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.”

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In its attempt to explode particular myths, however, Myth America engages in its own mythmaking. The book fundamentally misunderstands the crises facing the U.S. and the world. By implying that misinformation is the principal cause of the partisan rancor, violence, and general dysfunction that mark our current political moment, the collection obscures our much bigger problems. And by localizing the threat of misinformation and disinformation almost exclusively within certain far-right segments of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, Myth America absolves not only other stripes of conservatism, but also the milquetoast technocratic liberalism that helped set the stage for this moment. It’s not a total wash. Many of the book’s essays—like those by Elizabeth Hinton, Daniel Immerwahr, and Eric Rauchway—are exemplary models of political and cultural history. But the political project that birthed Myth America is ultimately a dead end—one that will only reproduce and exacerbate our present crises.

It’s all Trump’s fault. While co-editors Kruse and Zelizer acknowledge the stubborn persistence of older, widely held, and bipartisan myths—like that of American exceptionalism—they locate the source of their “legends and lies” overwhelmingly on the Trumpist right. Most of the myths they tackle either stem from “a deliberate campaign of disinformation” waged by conservatives—often with “obvious partisan motives”—or “bolster ideological stances that reinforce the modern Right.” These include the Lost Cause myth (Karen L. Cox) and the myth of widespread, systematic voter fraud (Carol Anderson).

This emphasis on Trump and the GOP—which is sure to drive book sales and pump up online engagement among the MSNBC set—serves two interlocking political functions: First, it advances the idea of Trump as an aberration, thereby exonerating other conservatives (such as the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, who lent a blurb to Myth America ). Second, it deflects criticism away from the politics in which Kruse and Zelizer are so deeply invested.

Myth America reinforces the idea that Trump is exceptional in ways both obvious and subtle, including, at times, through the exclusion of critical evidence. In their essay on the myth of the “free market,” for instance, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway claim that “conservative politicians and business executives” oppose the use of regulation and public investment to ameliorate social ills. While obviously true, this framing occludes the essential role played by liberals in the Democratic Party in our hard, decades-long turn toward market fetishism. Oreskes and Conway understandably focus on Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and their intellectual offspring. But as historian Lily Geismer compellingly argues, “Bill Clinton did more to sell neoliberalism than Milton Friedman.”

Another example: Michael Kazin’s contribution to Myth America rejects the idea that Socialists are dangerous opponents of democracy by properly situating them within the history of U.S. reform. But Kazin also suggests that the idea that socialism is “un-American” comes mostly or entirely from one political tradition. Although liberals, progressives, and anti-Communist leftists played conspicuous roles in supporting state-sponsored red scares throughout U.S. history, Kazin implicates only “conservative politicians and commentators” and “the Right.” To underscore this point, he opens his essay with Trump’s declaration during the 2019 State of the Union address that “America will never be a Socialist country.” But this speech drew enthusiastic applause from across the aisle, a fact that highlights the fully bipartisan history of American anti-socialism. Even progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) stood and clapped for Trump’s condemnation of the Socialist boogeyman.

Like most of the myths the volume tackles, the idea that Socialists are dangerous opponents of democracy is less a hallmark of the reactionary right than an expression of ruling-class interests—those of Republicans and Democrats alike—that’s perpetuated through popular discourse and mainstream politics. If Trump’s disregard for the truth helped shape his dreadful COVID-19 response, as Kruse and Zelizer suggest in their introduction, then why have liberals prematurely lifted mask mandates and other public-health measures and all but declared the pandemic over , even though 700,000 Americans have died of COVID during Joe Biden’s presidency? Similarly, Democratic and Republican leaders might diverge over their acceptance of basic climate science, as Oreskes and Conway show, but bipartisan fealty to fossil fuel interests and “market-based” solutions prevent both parties from taking meaningful action on the climate crisis. What good is the recognition of an urgent fact if it does not inform a path forward? What good is “the truth” if it brings you to the same unfortunate conclusions?

The Trump-as-exceptional thesis also requires, to some extent, rehabilitating past GOP monsters: Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, among others. In his essay on the Southern Strategy, for instance, Kruse argues that early 21 st -century Republicans wanted to distance themselves from the party’s previous efforts “to enflame white resentment.” George W. Bush’s administration “featured a racially diverse cabinet,” Kruse observes, “and promoted policies such as immigration reform.” But in actuality, such moves were superficial at best. Bush simultaneously beefed up the deportation machine, supported the construction of fencing along the U.S.–Mexico border, and expanded a national security apparatus devoted, in large part, to the harassment, abuse, and destruction of communities of color at home and abroad. In its attempt to deconstruct one myth, then, Myth America has perpetuated another—that of a once-noble conservative movement and Republican Party.

In a similar vein, Myth America uncritically accepts a dangerous myth forged by segments of the conservative movement: that Republicans were once the party of “clear-eyed realists.” Kruse and Zelizer write, “Until recently, Republicans fashioned themselves as realists who would keep the irrational idealism of Democrats in check.” At the same time, the co-editors explain, these very Republicans regularly stretched the truth or otherwise “drift[ed] away from facts in ways big and small.” So how meaningful was their rhetorical appeal to pragmatism and “hard truths” in the first place? Today’s conservatives also claim to be the realists, willing to speak “the truth” regardless of how unpopular or “politically incorrect” it might be. As the “ cool kids’ philosopher ” Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

If Americans can simply stick to the truth, Myth America implies, we might just defang the insurgent Trumpist right, suture our wounds, and start on the path toward national reconciliation. It’s a bit odd to read a group of historians make this claim, however, as others in the profession have spent the past half-century arguing that knowledge, truth, and expertise are constructed, contingent, and contested , and historical archives (and the study of history itself) often reflect processes of dispossession, extraction, and silencing . Who has the authority to narrate the past? Whose truths appear in dominant historical narratives, and whose get left out? “Facts” are hardly neutral, self-evident, or unassailable. Rather, they are often expressions of power.

Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

Edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. Basic Books.

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It is unclear what exactly Kruse and Zelizer hope to accomplish through this attempt to “set the record straight.” Of course, the desire to promote evidence-based analysis is an understandable response to birtherism, COVID denialism, QAnon, “America First” ethno-nationalism, the “great replacement theory,” rising antisemitism, “big lie” election claims, vicious attacks on LGBTQ people, and Jan. 6–style insurrectionism—all developments that thrive on easily disproven conspiracy theories. Yet the relentless focus on countering false claims reveals the centrist liberal tendency to see historical falsehoods more as causes than outcomes of political change. For Kruse and Zelizer, the current threat to U.S. democracy appears to center less on systems than on bad actors, whether they be conservative TV personalities, MAGA politicians, or Russian bots, who promote inaccurate and often uncritical historical narratives. There is an ineffectual particularism—not to mention a whiff of elitism—in their implication that historical literacy, informational authority, and the consumption of “better” information can “save our democracy.”

The problem is power, not party or personality or “knowledge.” A better approach might be to question if any private citizen, entity, or corporation, regardless of intent, partisanship, or competency, should possess the power and resources necessary to promote the scale of historical fictions promulgated by the Koch network, various corporate super PACs, or Fox News. Yet despite the inclusion of a minority of essays that do identify the bipartisan, elite nature of our most persistent myths—American exceptionalism (David A. Bell), the demonization of immigrants (Erika Lee), and the idea that the U.S. isn’t an empire (Immerwahr)— Myth America ultimately suggests that misinformation must be exposed and corrected by experts, not drowned out or destroyed through mass struggle and a fundamental transformation of material relations. The result is a work that appeals far more to individual intellect than collective condition or action, meaning that while it works well at distinguishing historical fact from fiction, its political impact will likely be minimal. As we watch the historical profession die before our eyes, we ought to expect more from its crème de la crème.

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MYTH AMERICA

Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past.

edited by Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

A book whose worthy aim remains unfulfilled.

Skilled historians attempt to refute the myths and misstatements about the American past that add to the confusions and bitterness of today’s politics.

Edited by well-known Princeton historians Kruse and Zelizer, the collection includes an impressive roster of contributors, including Michael Kazin, Erika Lee, Ari Kelman, Akhil Reed Amar, Carol Anderson, Naomi Oreskes, and Eric M. Conway. Among the targets are a host of flawed yet widespread beliefs: that Native Americans have played no significant role in American history; the Southern border has been a sieve allowing the entry of dangerous immigrants; socialism is a foreign import; the New Deal and Great Society failed; voter fraud has been commonplace; feminism has aimed to destroy the American family. Some essays are especially compelling. Drawing from his recent book, Daniel Immerwahr analyzes the mistaken belief that the U.S. is not an empire. Lawrence W. Glickman’s exemplary contribution on White backlash shows how myths originate and how historians can identify them, evaluate their substance, and deal with their internal inconsistencies. However, too many of the essays are slapdash, and the text has no center. Contributors often fail to adequately explain how myths originate in kernels of fact and, more importantly, what human needs they satisfy, and the myths they evaluate are mostly those of today’s right wing—as if the left doesn’t possess its own set of myths that require deconstruction. Furthermore, too many contributors display more scorn than sober analysis, often engaging in mere dismissal of other arguments or ideological stances—e.g., “the really staunch Right wacko vote.” In some essays, the contributors don’t offer enough context or sufficient explanation for their decision to examine a particular myth. The result is a work that, lacking careful editorial oversight, is less coherent and credible than its serious purpose warrants—or as incisive as we would expect from its esteemed contributors.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5416-0139-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past Hardcover – Jan. 3 2023

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• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Basic Books
• Publication date Jan. 3 2023
• Dimensions 16.26 x 3.94 x 24.26 cm
• ISBN-10 1541601394
• ISBN-13 978-1541601390
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (Jan. 3 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1541601394
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1541601390
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 600 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.26 x 3.94 x 24.26 cm
• #178 in Historical Essays (Books)
• #223 in Historiography (Books)
• #263 in United States Revolution & Founding

About the authors

Julian e. zelizer.

Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Zelizer, a CNN Political Analyst and NPR contributor, is the author and editor of 24 books on U.S. political history.

Kevin Michael Kruse

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Kathleen Belew

Kathleen Belew is an author, historian and teacher. Belew spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies.

Belew has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered, among others. Her research featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline).

As Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, Belew’s award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, and the meaning of war.

Her next book, Home, at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed tears in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).

Belew (Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University) has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. She is co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy (2021) and has contributed essays to The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (2022) and the New York Times bestseller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends about Our Past (2023).

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Myth america.

Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

Contributors

By Kevin M. Kruse

By Julian E. Zelizer

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 5, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Description

In this “incisive” ( Vanity Fair ) and “authoritative” (New York Times ) instant New York Times bestseller, America’s top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation’s past

The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperiling our democracy.      In Myth America , Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors—among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history.      Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today’s heated debates about our nation’s past.     With Essays By    Akhil Reed Amar • Kathleen Belew • Carol Anderson • Kevin M. Kruse • Erika Lee • Daniel Immerwahr • Elizabeth Hinton • Naomi Oreskes • Erik M. Conway • Ari Kelman • Geraldo Cadava • David A. Bell • Joshua Zeitz • Sarah Churchwell • Michael Kazin • Karen L. Cox • Eric Rauchway • Glenda Gilmore • Natalia Mehlman Petrzela • Lawrence B. Glickman • Julian E. Zelizer 

• United States
• 20th Century
• “[ Myth America ] brings together outstanding historians who draw on rich, often surprising recent research by themselves and others to present a much more complicated and less congratulatory picture of many of the most contentious issues in the nation’s history. Moreover, these essays treat readers to wonderfully accessible, jargon-free historical writing.” Lizabeth Cohen, Washington Post
• “An authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre.”    Carlos Lozada, New York Times
• “The book’s incisive essays poke holes in everything from American exceptionalism and white backlash to Confederate monuments and America First, taking us on a sobering tour through some of the nation’s deepest and darkest chapters.” Vanity Fair
• “The book’s essays…are exemplary models of political and cultural history.” Slate
• “Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsense.” Guardian
• “This important compilation deserves wide readership.”   CHOICE Connect
• “Illuminating and sharply written…Distinguished by its impressive roster of contributors and lucid arguments, this ought to be required reading.” Publishers Weekly, starred review
• “ Myth America ’s contributors take direct aim at the lies that are the lifeblood of the myths that grip American culture and politics today. This book is a collective work of courage in a time when ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ have never been so widely abused; if we believe in our craft as public historians and journalists, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer show us the way.”   David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass
• "An extraordinary essay collection by an extraordinary group of historians—each determined to make our national history usable in all the best ways. The truth does exist, and they tell it well. Together, they make an indispensable intervention for our troubled times." Beverly Gage, author of G-Man
• “Punching through the information overload with clear-eyed analysis, research rigor, and stylistic verve, this collection reveals the real history behind today’s headlines and upends long-enduring myths. Powerful, timely, and essential.” Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code
• “If you want to cling to your most cherished myths about history, this is a dangerous book. But at a time when both truth and history are under siege, Myth America has given us a blunt fact-check of many of the fictions that have come to dominate our political and cultural debates. An immensely important contribution and indispensable reference tool for confronting both the wish-casting and the disinformation about our past.” Charlie Sykes, editor in chief, The Bulwark

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Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

America’s top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation’s past 

The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperiling our democracy.     In  Myth America , Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors—among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history.    Replacing myths with research and reality,  Myth America  is essential reading amid today’s heated debates about our nation’s past.  With Essays By: Akhil Reed Amar • Kathleen Belew • Carol Anderson • Kevin Kruse • Erika Lee • Daniel Immerwahr • Elizabeth Hinton • Naomi Oreskes • Erik M. Conway • Ari Kelman • Geraldo Cadava • David A. Bell • Joshua Zeitz • Sarah Churchwell • Michael Kazin • Karen L. Cox • Eric Rauchway • Glenda Gilmore • Natalia Mehlman Petrzela • Lawrence B. Glickman • Julian E. Zelizer

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How German Atheists Made America Great Again

Taken together, two new books tell the century-long story of the revolutionary ideals that transformed the United States, and the counterrevolutionaries who fought them.

By S. C. Gwynne

S.C. Gwynne is the author of “Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War.”

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Matthew Stewart

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, by Manisha Sinha

What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery.

What actually caused the war, however, is a vastly more difficult idea. Try this explanation on for size: The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on a foundation of Christian religion and a vision of permanent, God-ordained economic inequality.

Though much of the South was poor, this new aristocracy was vastly rich. Two-thirds of all estates in the United States worth more than $100,000 were in the hands of Southern white men. Their goal in seceding was to undo the basic ideals of the American republic and keep their wealth.

These counterrevolutionaries — for that is what they were — insisted that men were by divine design unequal , both racially and economically. To fight this notion and crush what amounted to an existential threat to democracy, the antislavery movement needed ideas as much as, ultimately, guns.

That’s the narrative that frames Matthew Stewart’s engaging and often surprising new book, “An Emancipation of the Mind. ” The title refers to the rise of new ways of thinking in the antislavery movement, what Stewart calls “the philosophical origins of America’s second revolution.”

The most significant ideas that Stewart traces are religious. From 1770 to 1860, religion in America underwent a massive shift. The number of churches exploded, North and South. Soon, most of these churches, using clear and manifold endorsements of slavery from the Bible (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ”), were promoting and actively defending the slave republic.

As the antislavery crowd soon learned, it was impossible to spin “slavery is sin” arguments against biblical literalism. Ending slavery, Stewart says, “was hardly part of God’s plan.” This wasn’t just a Southern opinion: Three out of five clerics who published pro-slavery books and articles were educated at Northern divinity schools. Two decades before the outbreak of war, abolitionism was still a skulking pariah, a despised minority in the North as well as the South.

The abolitionists clearly needed help. Enter the Germans, specifically the freethinking Germans whose radical republican philosophy underpinned the failed European revolutions of 1848. “Freidenkers’’ like the theologian David Friedrich Strauss and the philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach formulated ideas of the laws of nature and “nature’s God” that were at odds with the tenets of Christianity.

A large group of German intellectuals, fresh from the battles of 1848, arrived on American shores, joined the abolitionist movement and radicalized it. As he did in his 2014 book “Nature’s God,” which traced the way that the heretical philosophies of Spinoza and Lucretius influenced American founders like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, Stewart here argues convincingly that these philosophers found willing listeners in the persons of Abraham Lincoln, who kept Strauss and Feuerbach on his shelf; Frederick Douglass, who saw American Christianity as “the bulwark of slavery”; and the abolitionist firebrand Theodore Parker, whose lectures reached as many as 100,000 people a year in the 1850s.

Wasn’t much of this simply revolutionary atheism? Yes, it was, and it’s a bit of a shock to find out how close Lincoln and Douglass were to these ideas, though they paid lip service to more conventional Christian beliefs when translating them for the public.

The other big idea here — also with help from the Germans, especially Karl Marx (a great admirer of Lincoln, who, Stewart argues, liked him too) — has to do with the economics of slavery. “At the root of the ills of the slave system,” writes Stewart, “lies the extreme economic inequality that it inevitably produces — not just between races but among the white population.”

Between 1852 and 1862, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote 487 articles for The New York Daily Tribune; Lincoln likely read them . They explained the war as “nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor.”

After the war came Reconstruction. How do you deconstruct Reconstruction? Very, very carefully. It’s one of the toughest, most maddeningly complicated tasks in the writing of American history. That’s because Reconstruction — the word we use to denote the failed post-Civil War attempt to build a more inclusive country — unfolded in different ways in different states, on different timetables and with a wildly proliferating cast of players.

In her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” the historian Manisha Sinha not only has taken on this vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally and spatially. Her Reconstruction embraces the Progressive Era, women’s suffrage, the final wars against Native Americans, immigration and even U.S. imperialism in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. She covers these difficult issues with remarkable skill and clarity.

In Sinha’s telling, the achievements of Reconstruction — we are in the latter 1860s and early 1870s here — are truly amazing. The federal decision to use the Army against recalcitrant ex-Confederates to secure rights for Black people resulted, she writes, in “a brief, shining historical moment when abolition democracy triumphed in much of the South and across the rest of the nation,” which “meant the inauguration of a progressive, interracial democracy.”

These years saw the passage of constitutional amendments that guaranteed citizenship, equal protection under the law and the vote for Black men. They also saw the rise of a powerful Freedmen’s Bureau, Black voting on a massive scale and the election of thousands of Black representatives to national, state and local office. More than 600 Black politicians were elected in the South to state legislatures alone.

Black Americans and freedpeople, Sinha reminds us, were themselves behind much of this change, a process she calls “grass-roots reconstruction.” As she laid out in her 2016 book “ The Slave’s Cause ,” and shows more briefly here, they documented atrocities and pushed to have them exposed, filed petitions, swore out affidavits at the risk of their lives and formed political organizations and lobbies.

But the Second American Republic would soon come crashing down, the victim of another violent counterrevolution whose principal weapons were racial terror and political assassination. In its place rose a New South, where class distinctions were shored up, where the government was by and for white men and where the belief that Black people were inferior to white people was firmly in place. Instead of economic freedom, Americans got debt peonage, stolen wages, criminalized self-employment and a convict leasing system. The great flowering of education during Reconstruction was trampled too as terrorists burned down more than 600 Black schools.

Sinha tells these stories well. She also pushes out beyond the conventionally defined subjects of Reconstruction. In her account, the ascendancy of Jim Crow and the conquest of the West, among other forms of repression, are profoundly connected, and not only because the government failed to protect Black liberty as well as Indigenous land rights and sovereignty. The Army that was raised to fight Southern counterrevolutionaries was redeployed in the West to subjugate Indians. The literacy requirements used to disenfranchise Black Americans in the South also proved effective in targeting immigrants and working-class people in the North.

Still, the ideals of the Second Republic did not completely wither on the vine. Sinha convincingly advances her vision of Reconstruction all the way forward to 1920, when the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage. That landmark event was inspired by the marquee equal rights amendments of the Reconstruction era, which, Sinha writes, “bequeathed a legacy of political activism and progressive constitutionalism” on the movement, a breath of air that gave America new life.

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND : Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America | By Matthew Stewart | Norton | 374 pp. | $32.50

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC : Reconstruction, 1860-1920 | By Manisha Sinha | Liveright | 562 pp. | $39.99

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Myth America: Human Rights and Civil Liberties in the United States Paperback – May 5, 2022

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• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Headpress
• Publication date May 5, 2022
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1909394912
• ISBN-13 978-1909394919
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Headpress; 2nd edition (May 5, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1909394912
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1909394919
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• #12,462 in True Crime (Books)
• #42,420 in Politics & Government (Books)
• #55,673 in Social Sciences (Books)

About the author

David mcgowan.

David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s books include Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion. Still at home in LA, he can be reached at [email protected].

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