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War, Money and American Memory
Author: Richard Earley
Publisher:
Published: 2000-07
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780788184796
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Written for intelligent persons willing to face disturbing facts and to regard American lack of historical perspective a national disgrace. Americans have long had a highly inflated opinion of themselves as warriors and as a people of noble character. Since the Civil War those who avoided the danger and death of that war have set the cultural and intellectual standards. Lying and evasion of that bitter truth has corrupted much of the American popular culture. Harsh truths reveal Americans as poor soldiers and not particularly brave as a people. For example, Americans readily believe we suffered and behaved gallantly in WW II, but that war brought prosperity and riches to many.
Inventing George Washington
Author: Edward G. Lengel
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2011-01-18
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 0061875538
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An entertaining and erudite history that offers a fresh look at America's first founding father, the creation of his legend, and what it means for our nation and ourselves George Washington's death on December 14, 1799, dealt a dreadful blow to public morale. For three decades, Americans had depended on his leadership to guide them through every trial. At the cusp of a new century, the fledgling nation, caught in another war (this time with its former ally France), desperately needed to believe that Washington was—and would continue to be—there for them. Thus began the extraordinary immortalization of this towering historical figure. In Inventing George Washington, historian Edward G. Lengel shows how the late president and war hero continued to serve his nation on two distinct levels. The public Washington evolved into an eternal symbol as Father of His Country, while the private man remained at the periphery of the national vision—always just out of reach—for successive generations yearning to know him as never before. Both images, public and private, were vital to perceptions Americans had of their nation and themselves. Yet over time, as Lengel shows, the contrasting and simultaneous urges to deify Washington and to understand him as a man have produced tensions that have played out in every generation. As some exalted him, others sought to bring him down to earth, creating a series of competing mythologies that depicted Washington as every sort of human being imaginable. Inventing George Washington explores these representations, shedding new light on this national emblem, our nation itself, and who we are.
When They Severed Earth from Sky
Author: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-01-02
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 1400842867
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years. We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions. Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.
William Lloyd Garrison and American Abolitionism in Literature and Memory
Author: Brian Allen Santana
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-03-11
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 1476624526
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For nearly 150 years, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the famed antislavery newspaper The Liberator, has been represented by scholars, educators, politicians and authors as the founder of the American abolitionist movement. Yet the idea that Garrison was the leader of a coherent movement was strongly contested during his lifetime. Drawing on private letters, diaries, newspapers, novels, memoirs, eulogies, late 19th century textbooks, poetry and monuments, this study reveals the dramatic social and political forces of the postwar period which transformed our perceptions of Garrison, the abolitionist movement and the first histories of the Civil War.
Red Earth, White Lies
Author: Vine Deloria, Jr.
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2018-10-29
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1682752410
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Vine Deloria, Jr., leading Native American scholar and author of the best-selling God is Red, addresses the conflict between mainstream scientific theory about our world and the ancestral worldview of Native Americans. Claiming that science has created a largely fictional scenario for American Indians in prehistoric North America, Deloria offers an alternative view of the continent's history as seen through the eyes and memories of Native Americans. Further, he warns future generations of scientists not to repeat the ethnocentric omissions and fallacies of the past by dismissing Native oral tradition as mere legends.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth
Author: Bradley J. Birzer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2023-08-29
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 1684516242
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →With a new introduction by the author Peter Jackson's film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy - and the accompanying Rings-related paraphernalia and publicity - has played a unique role in the disemmination of Tolkien's imaginative creation to the masses. Yet, for most readers and viewers, the underlying meaning of Middle-earth has remained obscure. Bradley Birzer has remedied that with this fresh study. In J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, Birzer reveals the surprisingly specific religious symbolism that permeates Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T.S. Eliot, Dante and C.S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us everyday, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.
Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History
Author: Richard Shenkman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-03-26
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 006209887X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The truth and nothing but the truth—Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends. The story of Columbus discovering the world was round was invented by Washington Irving. The pilgrims never lived in log cabins. In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock. Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell in love with his best friend's wife. Independence wasn't declared on July 4th. There's no evidence that anyone died in a frontier shootout at high noon. After World War II, the U.S. government concluded that Japan would have surrendered within months, even if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Becoming Kin
Author: Patty Krawec
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-09-27
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 1506478263
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.
Memories and Visions of Paradise
Author: Richard Heinberg
Publisher: Tarcher
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book offers a fascinating exploration of the psychological and historical meaning of stories such as "The Myth of Eden", and "Paradise". The author also examines new scientific evidence. Illustrated.
