One of the most original home-grown minds in American history. This fiftieth anniversary edition will introduce this magisterial work to a new readership, with a new introduction by Greg Grandin, one of today’s leading historians of US foreign policy. Reaching deep into thirteenth century British history to identify the motor contradictions of what eventually would become known as liberalism, Williams presents a wholly original interpretation of US history one where the story of the United States is the story of capitalism.Ĭoming as it did before the political explosions of the 1960s, Williams’s message was a deeply heretical one, and yet the Modern Library ultimately chose Contours as one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century. Williams was not the first historian to identify the United States as an imperial power, yet he was unique in linking domestic disquiet to the long history of American expansion, which he traced back to England’s Glorious Revolution. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to argue that the relationship between liberalism and empire was in effect a grand compromise, with expansion abroad containing class and race tensions at home. Van Evrie.William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Daughters of the Confederacy, famed for its promotion of the Lost Cause and segregation-well, guess what? Whom did they reprint? John H. I was actually stunned when I discovered that the first expression of Lost Cause ideology didn’t even come out of the South it came out of the North. Over 90% of the authors who wrote these textbooks were northern-born or certainly northern trained at northern universities.Ī lot of people believe the Lost Cause narrative-the myth that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights not slavery-came from the South, but your book shows that publishing houses in the North put out a lot of books about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Those cities dominated the distribution system. The publishing industry grew up in Boston, New York, and then a little later, in Chicago. A majority of Americans live outside the South, not in the South. It’s not a southern creation it’s a white northern creation. The central one would be northern responsibility for the creation of white supremacy. What myths did you set out to debunk with this book? Read more: A New Report Finds That 45 States Are ‘Failing’ to Teach Students About Reconstruction The textbooks that I read bore out everything he argued. He was designed by God and nature to do the white man’s work. His major theme was the necessity of having the African in American society because he was, according to Van Evrie, born to do the white man’s work. He created a small empire in Manhattan, where he published his own books, innumerable pamphlets, poetry, and two newspapers, which reached thousands of people. In one year alone, he ran advertisements in 1,400 different American newspapers. Van Evrie, often called “the nation’s first professional racist.” Why did you focus on him in your book?Īfter I had gone through white supremacist attitudes in all of these textbooks, I said, where does it come from? I spent a whole summer reading digitized newspapers and found references to Van Evrie all over the country. You feature a 19th-century New York editor named John H. They spent far more time discussing the introduction of single women to become wives of white settlers than they did on the introduction of slavery. Almost all of these textbooks spent maybe two sentences on the introduction of slavery in Virginia in 1619. These books didn’t consider people of African descent to be important, so they just weren’t included. In the pre-Civil War era, one is struck by how few images of African Americans there are in textbooks. This becomes the overwhelming theme of almost every single textbook from 1900 until the 1960s. Textbooks in the early 20th century said Reconstruction was a gross error, that it tried to elevate Black people who did not have the intellectual ability to govern, to participate in society. How did these textbooks distort facts about historical events? Read more: African-American History Finally Gets Its Own AP Class It’s a study of national identity because the purpose of textbooks is to acculturate younger people into American ideals, American destiny, and what is valued and honored by Americans.” And what these books were saying well into the 1960s was that it’s a white man’s world. After going through this whole collection, I thought, “Wow. The overwhelming majority of them treated the introduction of African Americans in American society as a “problem.” The further you go into the 20th century, this almost Evangelical theme of “the problem of a Negro” and how much he needed to be controlled because he was so inept and ignorant became the guiding theme of American history textbooks.
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