Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

by Kevin M. Kruse

The Trump administration’s long-running war on the truth culminated with a massive campaign to discredit the 2020 election and a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol

The first major development was the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, which ranges today from cable news networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News to websites such as Breitbart.

The second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth. All political parties, by their very need to pull in voters and push them to the polls,

As George Orwell famously observed in his dystopian novel 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future.”

Efforts to reshape narratives about the US past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular. From its very first hours, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lied that the new president had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” the Trump White House repeatedly made outlandish claims about its “unprecedented” place in history—

A history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda.

Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point.

Despite the fact that the term revisionist history is often thrown around by nonhistorians as an insult, in truth all good historical work is at heart “revisionist” in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect—and, yes, to revise—our understanding of the past.

Second, very few of the copious contemporary discussions of “American exceptionalism” have come close to showing that America really does represent a deviation from a significant international norm. Doing so in a serious way would require

The main Federalist argument in these influential essays was a Washingtonian geostrategic one that emphatically repudiated the idea that any individual state, post-ratification, could unilaterally leave the Union.

Regrettably, Indians had allied themselves with Great Britain, making themselves America’s enemies, the argument went, and employed tactics that had no place in civilized warfare—