Fighting over the Founders : : How We Remember the American Revolution / / Andrew M. Schocket.

• VerfasserIn: Schocket, Andrew M.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. 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 US 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 pasttwo decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. Whatare 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 Americans' 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Truths That Are Not Self-Evident: The Revolution in Political Speech -- 2 We Have Not Yet Begun to Write: Historians and Founders Chic -- 3 We the Tourists: The Revolution at Museums and Historical Sites -- 4 Give Me Liberty’s Kids: How the Revolution Has Been Televised and Filmed -- 5 To Re-create a More Perfect Union: Originalism, the Tea Party, and Reenactors -- Conclusion -- Further Readings -- Index -- About the Author