Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Jan 31, 2012

Jay rated it:

Jill Lepore’s short monograph is a significant piece of analysis and research. It should be required reading for all of the well informed—for all people who are truly considered in their understanding of the world about them. For all people who want to understand the rise and growing dominance of the Tea Party movement and its anti-historical nature.

The work is short: a prologue, five chapters and an epilogue. A total of 165 pages plus notes. But it is carefully crafted. Each chap More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 06, 2011

Bruce rated it:

It behooves all Americans to know more history, and Jill Lepore is an engaging historian and storyteller. Pay no attention to those who consider "liberal" an insult, or "elite" tantamount to treason. Lepore's history is sound, true, and telling. She comes not to bury the Tea Party but to clear up its members' misconceptions. Unlike most pundits these days, she does not bash opponents -- she quotes them, then examines the history they are quoting. She shows how history has bee More...

0 comments like

Sep 12, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

This was a really fast read; Lepore knows her history, and is comfortable enough with it that she can write about it in a way that's informative and conversational at the same time. Like a lot of Americans, I have a lingering fascination with the Revolutionary era, so getting a glimpse of what really went on during key moments, rather than romanticized interpretations of events, was something I enjoyed. Lepore treats her Tea Party contacts with considerable respect; while the conversations wer More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 23, 2011

Mark rated it:

A refreshing examination of the most recent American political movement to claim the revolutionary narrative of our nation's founding as their own. Harvard historian Jill Lepore jumps back and forth between the beginnings of the modern " tea party" movement in Boston, the history of the events surrounding our nation's birth in the same area, and a discussion about the meaning of history and the various political uses of the narratives of history. So far as I understood it, her premis More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 03, 2011

Tom rated it:

Historians use methods and have criteria of validity that are known to their profession. In this book Lepore, who is a historian writes of the various ways that 'history' is used for different ends. She compares what is historically agreed to about the American Revolution and the ways in which that history is distorted for different purposes. What she seems to miss is that there is history (as historians understand it) and there are the stories or narratives that people tell one another. Sometim More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 03, 2011

Lauren rated it:

I waffled between three stars and four, because even though Lepore does an excellent job articulating how political parties (with, as the title suggests, a particular focus on the current American political climate) have misrepresented and appropriated the Revolution for their own personal gain, I thought she could have perhaps engaged in more analysis and drawn more connections among the movements she discusses. But there's a lot of interesting stuff to be found here, including quotes that unde More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 23, 2011

Khulser rated it:

Thoughtful and deeply sympathetic probe into the various versions of the American Revolution that circulate as political coin today. As always, Lepore is informative, amusing and original. She adopts Benjamin Franklin and his beleaguered and little-known sister Jane Mecom as key characters in her narrative to explore attitudes towards liberty -- and more importantly towards wealth and property. Need we remind ourselves that the Revolution was ONLY about securing the rights of property, and the r More...

0 comments like

Feb 20, 2011

James rated it:

I wanted to read a book on the Tea Party (know your enemy and all that), and this seemed to be the most relevant one Amazon turned up on the Kindle - and excellently, turns out it was a good choice.

Rather than approach the tea party from politics, it approached them from a historical perspective (the author is a historian), and the gist of it is that they're massively distorting American history, and that appealing to the founding fathers and deifying them is bloody stupid. Which was More...

0 comments like

Dec 24, 2010

Peter rated it:

This is not a political history of the Tea Party movement so much as an extended meditation on the ways history, and historical interpretation, has been used and abused. Interspersing an almost ethnographic account of the Boston Tea Party (it's based largely on her interactions with Boston Tea Party members as well as research into the movement nationally)with reflections on the way "the founders" and "foundational moments" have been understood in the past, Lepore succeeds i More...

0 comments like

Oct 08, 2011

Doug rated it:

A review-blurb on the front cover of this book says "Lepore is a better reporter than any historian, and a better historian than any reporter." That short, muddled review is actually quite apt for this short, muddled book, mainly because it points up the fact that the author spends so much time being a reporter that she never quite makes it as a historian.

Her basic thesis is sound enough: the Tea Partiers are guilty of "historical fundamentalism," which she defines More...

0 comments like

Apr 17, 2011

Craig rated it:

Any Tea Partiers who pick up this book hoping for a "history" of their movement are going to be sorely disappointed. But if they want a history of the Founding Fathers that's easy to read and informative that might help them better define their own political history, this is the book for them. So what if it's written by a resident of the People's Republic of Cambridge; she knows more about the Revolution than anyone these folks have ever been around. It might even help Sarah Palin f More...

0 comments like

Nov 01, 2010

Jaylia3 rated it:

According to Jill LePore’s book our founding fathers were not prophets and they didn’t want to be worshipped. They struggled to make an imperfect but working Constitution that contained many compromises none of them were happy about, including that found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. In Federalist 14, Madison was disdainful of people who let a blind veneration for the past overrule their own good sense, knowledge and experience.

More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 14, 2010

Susan rated it:

This very worthwhile read is a quick but fascinating survey of the Tea Party and their attempt to whitewash and rewrite American history; their yearning for "a past that never was". Lepore convincingly illustrates the oversimplification - or "vanillafication" as I see it - by Tea Partiers and other conservatives of the original intent of the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. She does this simply by sharing the truth about the varied talents, temperaments and l More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 08, 2011

John rated it:

This is excellent, and actually much better than the subtitle might lead you to believe. It IS partly about the Tea Party and how they get American history, the Revolution in particular, wrong. But really it's about how the events and people whom we connect with the "founding" (a problematic idea that is sometimes thought to include, say, the Mayflower Compact) are constantly being re-imagined and appropriated by all kinds of groups and causes. The point is that when we want to make ar More...

0 comments like

May 17, 2011

Jessica rated it:

"The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History" functions as a quasey short history the modern Tea Party movement, by analyzing the 1776+ history and the 1970s bicentennial revival of interest in the Founding Fathers. Though I agree that the Tea Party is only the latest attempt at highjacking early American history to push a certain agenda, she mostly only discuses the history of said movement, along with touching on other times in which the More...

0 comments like

Jul 24, 2011

Margaret added it

After Gordon Wood's scathing review of this, I had to read it for myself. I agree with Lepore that the American Revolution has been grossly misinterpreted (but not for the first time) for current political use, and it is quite creepy how the ""founders"" have been made contemporary (the ""what would Benjamin Franklin think of the internet"" school of crap publishing), but Lepore's infiltration and sneering are as much a part of the problem as the people s More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 01, 2011

Forest rated it:

Lepore writes, "History is an endlessly interesting argument where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else." It's very easy to overlook how important both of these things are. Glenn Beck and others associated with the present day Tea Party movement are largely succeeding in rewriting history because they have created a new type of history where storytelling is everything and evidence, while not completely irrelevant, can easily be manipulated. Historians who rely on More...

0 comments like

Sep 13, 2011

N-rose rated it:

If you're looking for a historian's tome, perhaps this isn't quite it. Lepore's book does not read rigidly/ academically.

For me, that is a plus. I enjoyed her first-hand take on the Tea Party through events/ rallies, while making comparisons between popularly parroted Tea Party claims and Revolution-era correspondece and records, and also drawing in the tumultuous 170s and the bicentennial celebrations. There are interesting contrasts made; and for me, whenever I hear folks hearkening More...

0 comments like

May 03, 2011

Sandy rated it:

The author, a Harvard history professor, takes an interesting look at the current Tea Party movement through the prism of Revolutionary history and the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. She points out that using the Founding Fathers as a rallying cry to a cause is nothing new in American politics, but notes that the current Tea Party movement is more about fundamentalism than anything else. She is respectful towards the Tea Party activists she interviews, but makes clear the irony behi More...

0 comments like

Feb 17, 2011

Nathan rated it:

A great short read on the contrasts between the history of the tea party and revolution as understood by various people throughout american history on the one hand and as shown in the historical record on the other hand. While Lepore has been criticized for jumping between time periods, I found the device extremely useful to show contrast and get at the conflation of popular mythology and history. I thought she treated the modern day tea partiers with respect even while showing their understandi More...

0 comments like

Feb 05, 2011

James is currently reading it

I've just begun this book. It provides an historical insight into the modern Tea Party, while making continuous comparisons to the original 18th century Tea Party. Jill Lepore seems like a competent historian, and I generally tend to agree with her argument that our inclination to canonize into sainthood our various Founders is a misguided activity. AP American History, Howard Zinn, and general perusals into colonial American history demonstrate that a reevaluation of our Founders' motives shoul More...

0 comments like

Nov 03, 2010

Leilani rated it:

This book is short, but absolutely overflowing with research and fascinating historical ideas. Lepore moves back and forth between the lives of the heroes of the American Revolution, their wives, sisters, slaves, and their many disagreements with each other; the way Revolutionary history was used in the 1970s for modern political purposes; and the way people today have used certain facts and distortions about the past to promote their own ideas.

Lepore's writing is packed with things I More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2010

Brooks rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Dec 02, 2011

Katie rated it:

This was a very well laid-out book that presented the facts of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, the 1970's protests against Vietnam and the American Bicentennial, and today's Tea Party and their particular conservative mindset. It gave me images of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine that I didn't have previously, which makes me want to read more about them in depth. Jill Lepore is definitely a historian who looks at the way history, past and present, is being presented to the More...

0 comments like

Nov 14, 2010

Rachel rated it:

Jill Lepore is wonderful. It was really refreshing to read about interpretations of American history from a purely scholarly perspective. Lepore is definitely and unapologetically a liberal, but that's not the argument she's trying to have with this book. Her only point is that history is an area of serious academic study, and that there are right and wrong ways to interpret it. As a historian, she doesn't believe it's her place to use the history she studies in order to make current political a More...

0 comments like

Oct 26, 2010

Matt rated it:

News of a new book by Jill Lepore is enough to make a history buff like me scream like a middle-aged gay man at a Cyndi Lauper concert. Much of this book will be familiar to followers of Lepore in the pages of The New Yorker. She has edited several of her historical essays and reviews into a broader look at the tea party movement and its abuses of the nation's history for political purposes. Read my full-length review in the Oct. 20 issue of Willamette Week or at wweek.com (Princeton University More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 10, 2011

Lawrence rated it:

Some interesting points about history are lost in a random, almost stream of consciousness consideration of bits and pieces of historical trivia related to the American Revolution. The story is a patchwork of quotes/events from the current Tea Party movement, a lament about the misuse of history in popular culture, and an admonishment that we should rely more on historical scholarship than popular renditions of "historical" biography. While she attempts to put distance between the pas More...

0 comments like

Jun 11, 2011

vylit rated it:

I thought the book was an engaging read. Lepore's discussion of the history of Revolution and the personal details she included on the Founding Fathers were both interesting and informative. I wish there had been more details about the current Tea Party movement and the specific ideologies espoused by those in the 1960s and 1970s that spawned the current Tea Party movement. I believe the book would have been better with another 50 to 60 pages. However, it was both a fun and informative read. More...

1 comment like

Feb 26, 2011

Jason rated it:

Lepore's main point is that any attempt to try and bring the Founding Fathers (a phrase that did not exist until 1921) into our modern debates is pointless. Asking what Madison or Jefferson thought about health care is goofy, these are people who used mercury to treat headaches. And they are dead. OK, the Founding Fathers are dead, and the era in which they and their ideas were born is dead. Think about 1789 America. Women could not vote, most blacks were slaves, and even free blacks were n More...

0 comments like

Dec 08, 2010

Laura rated it:

This is a very timely account of the misuse of history by the modern "Tea Party" movement. The author, a Harvard historian, suggests that the current movement is something of a reaction to the protests that grew out of the feeble attempts to recognize the Bicentennial in the late 1960s and 1970s. America, she says, has never really figured out what to make of the story of the Revolution - but we can be pretty sure that the Tea Partiers aren't telling the truth.

0 comments like