"Trump can’t move fast enough to excise this nonsense from our public spaces. Burn down our cities, but leave our history alone."
"One of the greatest things President Trump has done for the country is to begin the long project of stripping our national parks and museums of anti-American bile.
"Earlier this year, I wrote about The New York Times’s special Fourth of July interview with Jia Lynn Yang, former national editor — and apparently quite an expert on U.S. history. Her main point was that Americans who are proud of their country are simpletons who believe in fairy tales. She then proceeded to emit a firehose of made-up stories of her own. (Someone needs to do a deep dive into those SAT statistics produced in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.)
"She claims we should discount inspiring stories about our founding because back then, history was nothing but “great stories that people like to tell over and over” that gave Americans “a sense of meaning.”
"Yang is confusing us with Africans. As we have been repeatedly told, “storytelling” is a primary source of African history. Indeed, the Western obsession with written records and documentation is a well-known example of “white supremacy.”
"But according to Yang, in the early days of our country, historians were just “rich guys … with a lot of time” on their hands, making up “great yarns.”
"Yes, like that slouch Justice John Marshall, who wrote a five-volume biography of George Washington, based on thousands of pages of public documents, privates diaries and the president’s original letters. Or the story of Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord based on 23 depositions signed by 94 eyewitnesses, including local minutemen, bystanders, alarm riders, and even three captured British soldiers, as well as Revere’s eight-pageaccount of his evening.
"Today, we have much more serious historians, like C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost, who wrote the book “A Black Queer History of the United States.” (A hint for those of you looking to do some early Christmas shopping!)
"To be fair, Yang doesn’t cite Snorton and Bost as examples of the “professional historians” she respects. The ones she cites are worse. They are Charles Beard and Annette Gordon-Reed. . . .More.
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