I have said many times here that I am a Constitutionalist, and I do believe that within the US Constitution and Bill of Rights one of those rare events occurred wherein something fundamentally important about a free society was set down on paper and enshrined into law. I enjoy reading Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Paine. But I also feel--both as a scholar and a teacher--the need to examine completely divergent viewpoints: not to debunk them, but hopefully to learn from them. One historian who always teachs me to re-frame the familiar is Francis Jennings--one of America's leading scholars on Native American studies. About a decade ago, Dr. Jennings wrote The Creation of American: Through Revolution to Empire , and I have been reading it again as I somewhat unsuspectingly agreed to conduct several in-service trainings for History Teachers in the colonial/revolutionary period this fall [I thought I was agreeing to do the Civil War era; really do have to learn to read the fine pr...

Celebrating the past is one thing. Rewriting history is another. I first watched Kenneth Clark's then universally acclaimed BBC documentary Civilisation in high school in 1974. [It had been released in 1969.] In many ways, Civilisation was to documentary television in the 1970s-1980s as Ken Burns' Civil War was in the 1990s: groundbreaking television more important for how it did what it did than for how accurately it portrayed its topic . Both Kenneth Clark and Ken Burns came in for a lot of criticism [more, I feel, in both cases than was merited] on narrow technical academic grounds. Clark, for example, was pilloried in some circles for the universal-sounding name Civilisation in a series that clearly focused only on Western Europe. Few people realized that Clark didn't choose the name for the series and didn't actually like it. None of which is precisely germane to this post. What interests me is that the entire series is now reappearing on You-Tube, ...

Lots and lots of my blogging friends from all parts of the political spectrum have chosen to mark the 4th of July by posting the Declaration of Independence. On one level I have no problem with that; retaining any awareness of the political thought of the Framers and Founders is generally a good thing. But I keep watching American history textbooks and the lessons used to teach our public-school students the turbulent era of the American Revolution, and I begin to realize that this piece of history presents some remarkable difficulties of narrative reinterpretation for our liberal and progressive friends. In the 1760s, at the end of the French and Indian War, the British government discovered that the price of securing the liberties of its American colonists from those dastardly, garlic-eating French was way more expected. Moreover, by that point, the English people in the home islands were among the most highly taxed people in the world. They paid taxes on stamps, lead, paper, glas...