And while there were some informative parts, there were some parts I found to be downright biological determinist and reactionary. The first issue I had with it was it seems to want to almost bring back the myth of Teutonism and Anglo Saxonism. it talks about how essential America's British past was and how it was what made America, not the broken backs of minorities and poor people . The second issue I had with it was the chapter on the "borderers" people from the north of England and lowland Scotland as well as Northern Ireland who settled in Appalachia and the Ozarks and are what people call "white trash" today. He basically implies these people were dirtier, dumber and more promiscuous than the rest of the British colonial stock, I won't say it feels racist because these people were largely of white ancestry, but this part of the book feels very classist and elitist.
I'm selling it short i'm sure. I'm not the brightest guy around, but in my gut I could feel why some on the right say this is one of the best books on American history. Because it appeals to that myth of "Anglo Saxon white America" they've got constantly playing in their heads.
Anyone else read this? What did you think?
That's funny, I read this in either late high school or college, and it was recommended by a lib social studies teacher who used a few excerpts in our APUSH class. Overall I thought it was interesting but way too fucking long. This was supposed to be the first part of a series, and the second book was going to be kind of a similar idea, but tracing the cultures of Black people back to Africa. I heard about this, like, fifteen years ago, and he still hasn't written the book, so I don't think it's going to happen, probably because a) it requires way more work (i.e., understanding African languages) and b) it undermines the idea that white folks in America were Guided By Ideals of Liberty (TM).
The author has another book I read, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythms of History, which is about how sometimes prices go up and sometimes they go down, and this is caused by Literally Anything Except Capitalism, extending back about five hundred years through European history. And I also read Washington's Crossing, which is about how Washington Is Awesome and he was friendly to his favorite slave (no mention of Ona Judge) and how it was cool and good for Washington to "condescend" to the lower classes because it was normal back then to be a huge fucking asshole. And I listened to most of the book he wrote about Samuel de Champlain, which is about how the guy was actually nice to indigenous people and wanted to create a new civilization with them and also about how they were kind of barbarians anyway so it was cool for them to be enlightened by the French. Yeah, I was and still am a fucking dork.
When I was a lib I loved that social studies teacher and got only A's in his classes although I was generally a C student. After I went to college and lived in South Korea for years I came back home and ran into him at a political event which was, ironically enough, held in the gorgeous, secluded mansion of an old white liberal (not the teacher) who freely admitted in a letter to the editor to the local paper that his ancestors had owned slaves. This was probably late 2017. I told the teacher about universal health care in South Korea and how it was so much better than the system in America in countless ways, mentioned that I had used it personally hundreds of times (mostly for vaxxing my young kids), and he looked at me like I was insane. He must have voted for either Biden or Warren in the primary. It's just funny to me that you can tell a liberal about a personal experience you have had, provide evidence to support even a relatively moderate point (universal health care), and they will still think you are a raving lunatic.
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