num_pages: 210
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History
publisher: Princeton University Press