Fighting over the Founders (eBook)

How We Remember the American Revolution

Andrew M. Schocket (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
Nyu Press (Verlag)
978-0-8147-7117-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation s aspirations. Americans increased fascination with the Revolution over the pasttwo decades represents more than interest in the past. It s also a site to work out the present, and the future. Whatare we using the Revolution to debate?In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing essentialist and organicist interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.

Inhalt

Contents  List of Illustrations ix  Acknowledgments xi  Introduction 1  1 Truths That Are Not Self-Evident: The Revolution in Political Speech 17  2 We Have Not Yet Begun to Write: Historians and Founders Chic 49  3 We the Tourists: The Revolution at Museums and Historical Sites 85  4 Give Me Liberty’s Kids: How the Revolution Has Been Televised and Filmed 125  5 To Re-create a More Perfect Union: Originalism, the Tea Party, and Reenactors 165  Conclusion 201  Further Readings 213  Index 237  About the Author 253 

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.1.2015
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• ISBN-10: 0-8147-7117-3 / 0814771173
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-7117-4 / 9780814771174