Description

Any history that touts itself as unconventional is bound to raise some hackles. The author challenges traditional interpretations of our nation’s past. Yet history is continually under revision.

What is America, after all? Author Lew Kaplan observes, "While this country is no longer the republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers, neither can it be construed to be a pure democracy since the checks and balances still remain in place. The federal government, which has encroached on the rights and obligations formerly delegated to the states with seeming impunity, is still restrained by the Constitution. The President needs the support of Congress for appointments to the Supreme Court. And even the Supreme Court can be overruled through a Constitutional amendment." In each chapter of his new work, Kaplan narrates major episodes of US history and shows how the three branches of government have worked with (and against) each other to achieve various national, Party, and personal goals.

Challenging some of the myths scholars have employed to explain our past, not a criticism of their intelligence or capability, but of the methodology they used in arriving at the conclusions they wished to promote. In order to validate their theses, they refer to documents of well-established scholars who came before them. Notes citing these “court historians” and authorities become the standard by which a new historical work is judged.

In this book the author has not relied on the conclusions offered by other writers. Instead, he views the established facts of United States history from the standpoint of commonsense to decipher instances of oversight, obfuscation and obvious (but masked or denied) interest. These are some of the distortions he highlights:

(1)  The early settlers may have come to America in search of religious freedom, but the early colonies were marked by religious intolerance, and soon the pursuit of freedom became synonymous with the pursuit of wealth.
(2)  The greatest blight on our past is the conscious and willful elimination of three million Amerindians in order to seize their lands.
(3)  The Constitution was composed exclusively by and for men of means, and its fundamental goal was to maintain the status quo. Legitimizing slavery was simply one of numerous compromises made by local competing factions to ensure ratification.
(4)  The conflict between the North and South was never over slavery; rather, it was over control of the Senate, the only legislative body appointed by the establishment.
(5)  The major blunder committed by Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government was to actively solicit the military support of the Border States, which opened the door to a land invasion from the North — impossible if they had remained within the Union.
(6)  Lincoln was the worst wartime president in our history, in that his strategy was responsible for 600,000 deaths on the battlefield.
(7)  The Emancipation Proclamation was designed to bring the Southern states back into the Union.
(8)  Reconstruction was designed by the congressional leaders of the Republican Party to prevent the South from forming a solid electoral bloc around the Democratic Party, which would have enabled the Democrats to take over the presidency and the Congress.
(9)  Economic depression is not a twentieth century construct, but occurred cyclically throughout the nineteenth century, brought on by incautious speculative investment in land and stocks committed by businessmen and banks, bought on unsupportable margin.
(10)  What makes this nation unique is that it had to establish its own traditions and create its own mythology in short order, quickly weaving a narrative that would inspire and unify the citizenry.