The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History

By Jill Lepore

Book Overview

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America." Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a wry and bemused look at American history according to the far right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independence--the real one, that is. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past--a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty--a yearning for an America that never was. The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691150273
• ISBN13: 9780691150277
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Jill Lepore brought it once again!

Being that the first book of Jill Lepores that I read were "these truths" and I have several of her books. She is a professor of American History at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker and her style is what I really liked about her from the very beginning of These Truths. You can tell how she believes by her commentary on whatever subject it is and I love how she gives the real, raw version of American History but not in a bad or anti-american bashing way. I just lover her so much and for a while now I have had the biggest crush on her. lol.