The themes are HUGE - and heroes become villains and villains become heroes depending on which lens one is looking through. I think we are finally starting to come to grips with the fact that it isn't just the story of WASPM America that is to be trusted, and I believe we are beginning, as well, to understand that it is as much the story of the interplay of all the histories of ALL the individual groups who have landed here (by choice, force, or chance - including those who wandered here in antiquity.) than any single strain of that history. The problem is that American history is so incredibly more complicated than that and is found in the interplay of all the people who have come to occupy the same space, literally and figuratively, with one another and between one another. For the future's sake, I had to piece together the two histories for my students, forcing them to read between the lines of a "standard US history" (or so the administration called it!) and various books telling the story of individual "non-standard" groups (again, the fretting language of administrators at the time!) The task was to recover the histories that had been lost or hidden and write them down as quickly as possible before they disappeared again.
) That was the "new" version of American history that was emerging in the late 60's and into the 70's when I was in graduate school and just beginning my career as a teacher. Sometime in the late 60's a competing version appeared - so-called ethnic histories, the stories of this or that "unmeltable" population (African Americans, Native Americans, women, Asian Americans. That is the history I was taught in the 50's and early 60's as I was growing up and coming of age.
In the beginning, there was only one version of American history - the one that began with the "discovery" of North America by Europeans, particularly the English, who created a beachhead of "civilization" on the East coast and then conquered a series of "frontiers" moving westward until they "won" and became God's gift to humanity, creating a country which is like a city built on a hill shedding light and progress everywhere else on earth.
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