Fighting over the founders : how we remember the American Revolution / Andrew M. Schocket

Object Details

Contents
1. Truths That Are Not Self-Evident : The Revolution in Political Speech -- 2. We Have Not Yet Begun to Write : Historians and Founders Chic -- We the Tourists : The Revolution at Museums and Historical Sites -- 4. Give Me Liberty's Kids : How the Revolution Has Been Televised and Filmed -- To Re-create a More Perfect Union : Originalism, the Tea Party, and Reenactors
Summary
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
Data Source
Smithsonian Libraries
Date
2015
Revolution, 1775-1783
Author
Schocket, Andrew M
Type
Books
History
Physical description
xiv, 253 pages ; 24 cm
Place
United States
Topic
Collective memory
National characteristics, American
Political culture
Popular culture
Public opinion
Historical reenactments
History
Influence
Historiography
In motion pictures
Record ID
siris_sil_1045521
Usage
CC0