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 U.S. 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 past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It's also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are 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 American's 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.
Review: This populist study of recent speeches, films and published works reveals the many uses of America's founding ideals. Schocket has sifted through reams of material, film and text over the last 15 years and even embarked on his own treks to national historic sites like Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg for a firsthand look at how the American Revolution is presented to the masses.
He sees the allusions to the Founding Fathers and revolutionary heroes in speeches by Mitt Romney or President Barack Obama, and in best-sellers like David McCullough's John Adams or PBS's animated Liberty's Kids, as serving one of two points of view: An 'essentialist' approach holds the memory of the founding myth as unchanging, true and knowable-i.e., the conservative approach.
The 'organicist' viewpoint maintains a more fluid approach, seeing America as an evolving theater of multicultural and feminist principles-i.e., the liberal approach. The mere mention of 'founding fathers' seems to be a catchphrase for many essentialist notions, such as whiteness, gun possession, right-to-life, even Christian, while the Constitutional phrases 'more perfect union' and 'created equal' sum up many of the organicists' tenets, such as dedication to equality and belief in progress.
The discovery by DNA proof that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his black slave Sally Hemings has blown open the neat-and-tidy mythology of the upright and incorruptible Founding Fathers and forced a reckoning with a more complicated, messy story. Schocket's visits to such historic sites as the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum and Philadelphia's private National Liberty Museum reveal the array of co-opting of the revolutionary messages.
Along with Hollywood's take, the author delves into recent Constitutional Supreme Court battles and the formation of the Minutemen and tea party movements. Organized, accessible history for everyone. -Kirkus Reviews In a time when American political discourse has come to seem both intellectually stagnant and increasingly strident, Andrew Schocket's smart and generous book should be essential reading for all of us-politicians and ordinary people alike-who would hope to reclaim a reasonable approach to the memory of the American Revolution and the meaning of its legacy.
Fighting over the Founders gives us a fine reminder of the way imaginative scholarship helps promote informed citizenship, and Schocket deserves our thanks for writing it. -Gregory Nobles,co-author of Whose American Revolution Was It? In dealing with historic sites the tension between representing a complex history and satisfying sponsors and the public is richly conveyed.
Schocket also brings out the problematic black experience at these
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