Chapter Eleven

The Republican War on History

“What we see in here isn’t always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. So what? We know the truth, and that’s good enough for us.”

So speaks Addison, a young female character in former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s cartoon Learn our History series. In the series—tagline: “Take Pride in America’s Past”—a group of kids called the “TimeCycle Academy” ride their bikes back in time to learn about U.S. history. But not just any version: It’s a mythologized and religiously infused account, provided to counter the alleged “hate America” narratives of the cultural left.

Thus in the sample World War II video, Adolf Hitler’s evil is unleashed across Europe, but the U.S. rallies and even the “gals,” like Rosie the Riveter, pitch in. At least in the sample video, however, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears absent.

Huckabee’s series offers another sample video about the Reagan Revolution. At its beginning, America of the late 1970s faces a “financial, international, and moral crisis”—epitomized by scenes of Washington, D.C. drowning in squalor and street crime. But “one man with some very big ideas set out to make a huge impact.” He gave people “hope,” says Addison. Then, at a speech given in New Hampshire in September of 1980, we see a campaigning Ronald Reagan saying,

God had a plan for America. I see it as a shining city on a hill. If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.

“One man transformed a nation . . . and the world,” Huckabee’s video goes on to declare—and soon the Cold War has been won, with Reagan ordering Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

From a liberal perspective, this is hogwash. Words like reductionist, triumphalist, even jingoist come to mind. For Huckabee, it would appear that history is a simple, linear story that makes America look great—and why not? We are God’s chosen, after all.

It gets worse. It looks like the Ronald Reagan quotation above isn’t even something the former President said—or at least not in September of 1980, while campaigning in New Hampshire. Rather, the words seem to be an amalgam of many things Reagan said over the years: a composite speech, at best. Reagan often spoke of a “shining city on a hill.” That great line—“if we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under”—was said at an Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast in Dallas, Texas on August 23, 1984.

A liberal found this out, of course—tracked it back to the sources, proved it. As if the goal of this sort of conservative history is to keep good footnotes.

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The Huckabee series is just one in a number of recurring cases in which conservative politicians, intellectuals, and activists have been caught committing historical fouls for ideological reasons. Consider a few recent episodes, several quite infamous:

Embedded in these examples, one finds historical errors of many types. There are simple factual mistakes that seem to emanate from confusion, but that also have an ideological tinge and then are rigidly defended. There are egregious, motivated misrepresentations (the Texas Board of Education trying to sow doubt among students about whether the First Amendment creates a separation of church and state). Finally, there’s anachronism, “the unthinking assumption that people in the past behaved and thought as we do,” as the British historian John Tosh defines it—which is the only way Barton can possibly talk about a “creation-evolution” debate occurring before Darwin, and about Tom Paine advocating “creation science.”

But don’t just focus on the specific errors and misrepresentations—we know by now that people will commit almost any sort of reasoning flub in service of an emotional goal. Rather, what’s important here is to sense that goal, that deeper purpose. The misinformation here isn’t of an idle, accidental sort. As with the Huckabee videos, these erroneous stories are told in service of a broader triumphal and providential narrative about America—Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

In this story, America is a unique nation, blessed and chosen by God, founded in religious faith. It has righteousness and good on its side—and its enemies (Nazis, Soviet communists, and so on) are the purest incarnation of evil on Earth. America has been threatened, but great leaders (chosen by God) have emerged at critical times to win the fight against those forces—epitomized by Ronald Reagan.

The story is a Christian one, a Manichean one, a simplistic one, a comforting one, and a certain one. Psychologically, it is deeply conservative. It is about nothing if not maintaining and honoring tradition—in this case, the tradition of America as a great and heroic nation (whose citizens keep themselves armed and free!).

The problem—for fact-loving liberals—is that this isn’t an accurate story. It doesn’t obey the evidentiary canons of academic historians, and the details it ignores deeply complicate or confound the conservative narrative. There are ugly moments in America’s past, too, ones that you can’t paper over. Slavery. Segregation. Lynchings. The slaughter of native Americans. Japanese internment during World War II. This doesn’t make America a bad country today: We’ve changed a lot, learned a lot, progressed a lot. But it doesn’t help to whitewash and mythologize things—or, so reason liberals and academic historians.

But as we’ve already seen, when it comes to biased conservative reasoning on behalf of deeply held beliefs, rigorous scholarly accuracy has little to do with it. What matters is having an argument—any argument, so long as it meets the minimum threshold of making you feel reaffirmed and sure of what you think, and what your group thinks. What matters is whether you can cobble together, and defend, an assortment of facts that bolster your identity and satisfy your psychological needs.

On history—as on science, as on economics—conservatives have done just this. They’ve written a powerful and compelling (though inaccurate) script that reinforces their system of beliefs in both a logical and an emotional way—a narrative they can then pass on to children at their earliest ages, as in Huckabee’s videos. In many ways quite brilliant and even beautiful in its simplicity, this script casts them as—yes—“The Tea Party,” sharing the same values as the original American revolutionaries, and carrying forward their tradition.

And what have liberals done in response to the right’s historical narrative? As we’ll see, they certainly haven’t twisted history in the same systematic way (a few troubling cases notwithstanding). But they rarely know how to respond to conservatives’ historical misinformation—which is not with rebuttals, but by telling moving and accurate historical stories of their own.

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In the words of historian Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, the intellectual traditions of liberalism on the one hand, and rigorous historical analysis on the other, are closely linked. As Perlstein puts it:

Liberalism is rooted in this notion of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use our reason, and we can use empiricism, and we can sort out facts, and using something like the scientific method—although history is not like nuclear physics—to arrive at consensus views of the truth that have a much more solid standing, epistemologically, than what the right wing view of the truth is: which is much more mythic, which is much more based on tribal identification, which is much more based on intuition and tradition. And there’s always been history writing in that mode too. But within the academy, and within the canons of expertise, and within the canons of professionalism, that kind of history has been superseded by a much more empirical, Enlightenment-based history.

The basic story of how this happened closely parallels the story of the Scientific Revolution, which began in the mid 16th century. If you go back to the illustrious historians of Greece and Rome, you do find occasional pushes toward the sort of accuracy that is now an academic norm—particularly with a historian like Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. But you also find much storytelling and mythos. The rigorous rules for identifying and handling original sources that now mark the profession didn’t yet exist.

True modern history originates first in the Renaissance, and then especially in the so-called Age of Reason. How to ring in the change? To put it bluntly, historians started debunking mythology and nonsense that had been passed down uncritically over the ages. In one classic early case, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla conclusively proved in1440 that the “donation of Constantine,” a document allegedly from the 4th century that gave the pope power over much of the Roman Empire, was a forgery. As part of Valla’s case, he showed that the text contained words that would not have been used in Constantine’s time, like satrap—a classic historian’s maneuver.

From there, what we now call the “historical method” gradually developed, often with many important contributions from religious scholars. In the 19th century came the development of a movement called “historicism” at the hands of scholars like the German Leopold von Ranke, who pledged “merely to show how things actually were.” For the historicists, the goal was to understand the past on its own terms, shielded from the presentist impulse to read it in service of some immediate goal or impulse—nationalistic, nostalgic, or outright political.

In other words, history was becoming more of a science. It was developing its own standards of objectivity. History can never, as Perlstein notes, be physics. Nor can it tell all that happened in the past—there’s simply too much information. Historical evidence always has to be organized into some type of narrative, which inevitably involves some picking and choosing.

Nevertheless, good history can practice rigor, it can validate and refute vying accounts, and it can arrive at scholarly consensus. And just like science, it has a methodology and a community of scholars dedicated to enforcing the standards and norms associated with quality work.

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However—and by now this will come as no surprise—the scholars who practice these critical techniques within universities today are overwhelmingly liberal. In Neil Gross’s and Solon Simmons’ survey of the politics of university professors, the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters among historians was 18.9 to 1. With economists, you’ll recall, the ratio was roughly 3 to 1. Such figures lend at least a superficial validity to the standard conservative critique of academia—that it has its own raging biases—a critique that then empowers conservative counterexpertise and, ultimately, counterreality.

In the case of history, that critique takes a distinctive form: It levels charges of historical revisionism against the academic left. The argument is that rather than telling the traditional story of America as a land of liberty and opportunity (perhaps blessed by God), leftist historians who actually loathe the country have instead been telling stories about the evils of capitalism and the U.S.’s leaders, and trying to get those into the textbooks.

Revisionism is often used as a term of opprobrium—with undertones of “Holocaust revisionism”—although technically speaking, every good historian engages in this process. New historical research is nothing if not an attempt to “revise” our understanding of the past by bringing to light new details and new interpretations. That’s a good thing, most of the time. However, revisionism has also come to mean retelling history with an ideological agenda, and perhaps going so far as to deny past events (or fabricate them). Thus, the term has attached to the faux “historical” arguments used to support Holocaust denial and conspiratorial ideas about U.S. history, such as the notion that Franklin Roosevelt knew the Pearl Harbor attack was coming but did nothing about it, because he wanted us to be drawn into war.

There’s no reason, however, that excessive or indefensible forms of revisionism should only be found on the left. In fact, as we’ll see, many of the most abusive revisionist takes on U.S. history are of recent conservative vintage (although there really is some biased left-wing history out there to be wary of).

The conservative critique of revisionism sharpened greatly in the 1990s, amid charges of “political correctness” on the campuses. In a much noted 1994 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History,” Lynne Cheney, wife of the later vice president and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, denounced a new set of National Standards for the teaching of U.S. history that, she said, delivered a breed of “politicized history” typical of the “academic establishment.” Cheney’s chief complaint was that the new standards privileged the counternarratives of disadvantaged groups (native Americans, African Americans, women suffragists) over a standard U.S. history focused on the founders, the presidents, the wars, and so on. “We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it,” wrote Cheney.

The critique in some ways culminated—as critiques often do—in the mouth of a president of the United States, George W. Bush. In 2003, as “WMD” failed to materialize in post-invasion Iraq, Bush accused critics of the war of engaging in “revisionist history.” Actually, the true revisionists in this case were to be found in the Bush administration itself. After the biological and chemical weapons that we went to war over weren’t to be found, the administration began to goalpost-shift about its causus belli, suddenly stressing the importance of liberating Iraq’s oppressed people or preventing the country from getting dangerous weapons (rather than on the pre-war claim that Saddam needed to be disarmed).

Nevertheless, we must concede that the critique of left wing “revisionist” history has some merit. Take the late Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present has sold over a million copies and greatly influenced many high school and college students. Alas, Zinn’s account—allegedly focused on the people, rather than the powerful—has been severely criticized by other scholars, and not just on the right.

“Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence,” writes the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, a liberal and co-editor of the magazine Dissent. “A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.” One key problem, Kazin explains, is that Zinn is so busy painting a battle between the Little Guy and the Man—“a class conflict most Americans didn’t even know they were fighting”—that “his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity.” If he doesn’t understand these two phenomena, Zinn could scarcely be said to understand America—or, ironically, average working-class Americans, the much touted people of his title.

This is hardly an inconsequential oversight. Zinn’s approach prevents those liberals and leftists who fall under its sway from understanding why middle- and lower-class Americans seem so often to vote against their economic interests—and for the Republican Party, the party of the wealthy. Such behavior is inexplicable if you’re only able to think in terms of an egalitarian narrative pitting “people” against “the powerful.” However, it’s very understandable if you recognize the psychological motivations that ground our politics, and that truly separate left and right—in turn allowing you to perceive that egalitarianism is only one moral impulse or intuition among many, and one that runs much stronger in liberals.

That’s not the only problem with Zinn: His book even goes so far as to suggest that the U.S. entered World War II out of questionable motives: racism (against the Japanese), imperialism, business interests. Never mind, uh, Hitler’s racist quest for world dominance. Clearly, conservatives have a point about left wing revisionism.

Zinn deeply troubles me, because I recognize his kind of thinking all too well among my intellectual compatriots. But thankfully, and in good Enlightenment fashion, it is liberal historians themselves, like Kazin, who have criticized him and set the record straight. Meanwhile, conservatives have taken a few cases of academic excess as an excuse to ignore academia entirely, and simply spin out their own reality—in the process far outstripping anything Howard Zinn has done.

For a telling case study, consider how right and the left have told the story of one of the lowest moments in American history—the disgusting forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children, the majority of them U.S. citizens, during World War II. Following upon Pearl Harbor, the roundup was centrally driven by racism, hate, and of course, wartime fear—leading, very predictably, to authoritarian responses and the demonization of out-groups. One newspaper columnist at the time wrote of Japanese Americans that we should “herd ’em up, pack ’em off, and give ’em the inside room of the badlands.” General John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Army’s Western Defense Command, put it like this: “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

Howard Zinn highlights this event in A People’s History, and you can hardly blame him. It really did happen, and it really can be used to cast our country in a bad light. But highlighting a real historical event is no crime. And it is nothing compared to the right-wing answer: Columnist and TV personality Michelle Malkin’s 2004 book In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. In her book, Malkin rejects the historically established explanation for Japanese internment—which, not surprisingly, strongly emphasizes racial prejudice—and claims instead that we’ve all been laboring under a “politically correct myth of American ‘concentration camps.’” To the contrary, Malkin argues, there was strong evidence—in the top secret MAGIC cables from Japanese diplomats, which U.S. intelligence forces had intercepted—of a “meticulously orchestrated espionage effort” on the part of Japan, using Japanese Americans. And this, says Malkin, justified internment.

Historians, however, have sternly rejected her “speculation” about the MAGIC cables, as one scholar puts it. As a group of them wrote in protesting the book:

. . . This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission.

Sounds much like what you hear whenever the experts stand up to denounce bad science or bad economics—only it’s history this time.

I lack the space to enumerate how many other important episodes from the American past have been subjected to a similar form of conservative revisionism. Books could (and will) be written on the subject; and at least one sweeping book of bad right-wing history is already in circulation—The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, authored by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and published by the conservative Regnery Press (also the publisher of Malkin’s book). From the Revolutionary Era up through the Clinton years, it’s all there. To summarize it, here is the slap-down provided by one academic critic:

Suffice it to say that the book asserts that the American Revolution was no revolution at all; that the Civil War was not about slavery; that the so-called robber barons made America great; that the New Deal made the Depression worse; that the war on poverty made poverty worse; that Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia was a waste of taxpayer money. Not only does Woods reduce complex events to these kinds of simplistic interpretations, he doesn’t even acknowledge that rival interpretations exist. It’s history not as analysis but as catechism.

My goal here is not to debunk all the separate conservative historical misconceptions in detail. What’s important is to understand the emotional power of the right’s historical counternarrative—seeing how conservatives intermingle their psychological needs with motivated reasoning to come up with false history. In the face of this, liberals can only respond by telling historical stories of their own, better stories than Howard Zinn’s, because they will be both emotionally moving and also accurate.

And if we want to tell better stories, there is only one place to turn: the “Founding”—the story of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the men who wrote and signed these documents.

The right’s historical revisionism has centrally focused on this single grand episode, for obvious reasons. Just as the Book of Genesis shows God’s providential hand in the beginning of it all, conservatives want to read the founding as a Genesis story for America. But they’ve gotten this most important of series events badly wrong. In fact, they betray the truth about America in their abusive retelling and undermine our very heritage, which is permeated with Enlightenment values.

This is the chief reason why it is that in the historical realm, just as in so many others, conservatives more than liberals are at war with reality.

To prosecute its war on early American history, the right of course fields a team of “experts.” There is perhaps none more relied-upon than the aforementioned David Barton, the conservative Christian head of WallBuilders, and a man whom we’ve already encountered depicting Tom Paine as a supporter of creationism. Barton has led the attempt to depict the U.S., from its founding, as a “Christian Nation,” and in the process, to Christianize our founders, who (especially Madison and Jefferson) were men of the Enlightenment highly committed to creating a republic in which government and church affairs were kept separate.

Barton is a case of a sort that we’ve seen before: A Christian conservative who felt driven, by God, to go out and start making a political and even scientific argument. In his 1988 book America: To Pray? or Not to Pray? Barton argued that the Supreme Court’s ban on school prayer in the early 1960s caused all manner of devastating societal consequences. At the outset of the book, he openly relates how God told him to start working on the project. More specifically, Barton writes, God told him to find out when the Supremes banned school prayer, and also to acquire a record of student SAT scores over time. “I had believed that the two instructions were separate and distinct, yet I soon discovered that they were unquestionably related,” Barton remarks—proceeding to show how test scores fell off a cliff just after the expulsion of prayers from schools. So of course, that must have been the cause!

But even more than critiquing the school prayer rulings and attempting to show how they’ve triggered our moral decline, Barton is known for endlessly trying to prove that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation.” His arguments on this point are many and varied—from counting bibles allegedly procured by the Continental Congress, to claiming that the first Congress under the new Constitution wanted religion taught in schools, to asserting that as president, Thomas Jefferson set aside land for preachers to evangelize to the Native Americans. At the same time, Barton also shows a strong disconfirmation bias against evidence of the U.S.’s secular founding. He seeks to debunk or reinterpret rather large data points like the fact that the U.S. Constitution does not invoke or even contain the word “God,” or the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which stated that “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion . . .”

Kind of hard to argue with—but of course, Barton can.

In one extreme case, Barton has been caught misrepresenting one of the most important founders, Thomas Jefferson. I’ve already quoted Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, which contains the famous phrase “wall of separation between Church & State.” It is a very devastating piece of counterevidence, as it comes from one of the most influential founders and directly states that such a wall was created by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. However, Barton has claimed that Jefferson also said to the Danbury Baptists that the wall was meant to be “one-directional . . . It keeps the government from running the church, but it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.” No such claim is to be found in Jefferson’s (quite brief) letter.

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But if Barton and his acolytes can misrepresent the most important founders, they can also make up new founders—or at least, quote people from the revolutionary era whose views do not provide a solid basis for interpreting the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.

Take Patrick Henry, the Virginia theocrat who opposed the Constitution and sought to impose taxes on Virginians to provide income for Christian ministers—about as blatant a church-state melding as you can imagine. Henry clashed regularly with James Madison over church-state matters.

Barton and other conservatives often quote and celebrate Henry, and other so-called “anti-Federalists.” And it must seem irresistible: The anti-Federalists were afraid of too much centralized power and government control, just like today’s conservatives are. The only problem is that, as the historian Cecelia Kenyon put it in 1955, the anti-Federalists were “men of little faith.” They didn’t believe in the great American experiment, and they actively criticized and opposed it (including complaining about explicitly secular aspects of our Constitution, like its prohibition on religious tests for public office). They were not in favor of the union we live in today (though their plea for a Bill of Rights was ultimately successful).

But it takes far longer to explain this than it takes to quote (or misquote) something uplifting that Patrick Henry said. There is so much bad conservative history about the origins of America that liberal Enlightenment laborers can barely manage to debunk it all.

A case in point is Chris Rodda, an author who has tirelessly attempted to set the record straight about religion and the U.S. founding by refuting right-wing misinformation in her multi-volume, ongoing book project entitled Liars for Jesus. As Rodda writes in volume I, one book just wasn’t enough for the task:

I found so many lies, in fact, that I soon realized that they weren’t all going to fit one book without omitting some of the information that I felt was necessary to thoroughly explain and disprove them. So, I decided to write not just one book, but two – the first focusing mainly on the founding era, up until around the 1830s, and the second covering the rest of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Because most of the lies in the religious right history books are about the founding era, however, the first volume began to get too long, and I was once again faced with the decision of leaving stuff out, or including everything and splitting it up. Since my goal from the beginning was to write a book that left no stone unturned, and provided as much information as possible, I decided to split the first volume into two volumes. This book, therefore, is the first of what will eventually be three volumes.

Poor Rodda! Just as conservatives like Barton expend endless energy trying to “prove” their version of American history, liberals like Rodda expend endless energy refuting them. I’ll take Rodda on the facts, but we must remember at all times that the facts aren’t the sole issue. It’s all about the story, and being able to tell a compelling one. It’s about protecting the belief system, one that fulfills the need for certainty by conferring a black and white worldview. Set that up first, and conservatives are capable of generating volumes of misinformation in areas that they care about, and defending it when challenged.

When it comes to the founding of the country, they care deeply indeed.

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So what should liberals do? Not refute the nonsense endlessly—I’ve already done a share of that here, and we can count on liberal Enlightenment laborers like Chris Rodda to carry forward this back-breaking work. But if fact checking is the only approach liberals take, it will be sure to fail. And so will they.

Rather, when it comes to history—and more broadly, the stories we tell about ourselves—liberals should take the Schindler’s List approach. They should find the most powerful stories from the past that emphasize liberal values—stories that are true—and tell them, over and over.

For instance, most Americans don’t understand what kind of men the founders really were. They’re distant, ethereal figures, rather than flesh and blood men who were not only heroes, but had, in many cases, strong liberal and Enlightened views.

And if we should tell stories of the true secular nature of the founding—and the heroism and courage it took to create a nation that tolerated all religions but did not force any one religion on anyone—we shouldn’t stop there. Some of the most powerful liberal stories from the American past are about civil rights, about how much more tolerant of a place America has become—though it’s still hardly perfect—and how long and terrible a struggle it was to get here.

These stories connect past to present and impart a sense of hope, without ignoring or downplaying the horrors of racism and violence directed at out-groups. And they inspire a chief liberal emotion—empathy. If you want to see a perfect example of how it’s done, turn not to an academic book or a liberal factual debunking, but to a country musician. Singer-songwriter Brad Paisley encoded liberal values perfectly in his hit song “Welcome to the Future,” which draws heavily on U.S. history to paint an inspiring story of progress. Its last and most powerful verse runs like this:

I had a friend in school,

Running back on the football team.

They burned a cross in his front yard

For asking out the homecoming queen.

I thought about him today

And everybody who’s seen what he’s seen

From a woman on a bus

To a man with a dream.

Then Paisley sings, “Wake up Martin Luther, welcome to the future.”

Told well, liberal history will elicit the egalitarian values, and the related empathetic emotions, evoked by these very simple verses. It will be accurate, yes. But it will never forget the importance of the story or why it matters.

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The past three chapters have provided a deep immersion in conservative wrongness. I’ve dragged us across fact-check archives and across subject areas, noting myriad errors, distortions, and misrepresentations.

What’s more, none of these errors have arisen by accident. They exist because they serve a psychological purpose or need; and they are defended, in the face of challenge or even unequivocal refutation, through the various mechanisms of motivated reasoning—confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and so on.

The evidence of conservative error is massive—but I cannot be said to have seriously analyzed the problem unless I turn the tables and look at liberal delusions as well. Such is the goal of my next chapter. In it I’ll show some true motivated falsehoods on the left; but I’ll also show them being handled very differently than on the right and not, overall, being clung to dogmatically (except, perhaps, among a small minority of ideologues) or going politically mainstream.

And why is that? Simply, I’ll posit, because liberals need these errors less—and, at the same time, they need accuracy more. Liberals are, after all, the children of the Enlightenment. And they don’t bow to authority, or pledge allegiance to a team. They want to use science to make the world better, and so if science demonstrates that an alleged “problem” actually isn’t a problem then they’re happy to shift their views and devote their resources elsewhere. Right?

Let’s see if, after reading the next chapter, you agree.

Notes

202 “Learn Our History” series The website for Huckabee’s series is at http://learnourhistory.com/. The World War II and Reagan Revolution sample videos can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so2ZtsUAAts and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYROOD7T1Vk&feature=related.

203 “we will be a nation gone under” Ronald Reagan: Late A President of the United States, Memorial Tributes Delivered in Congress. U.S. Congress: Government Print Office, 2005. See p. 112–114 for Reagan’s ecumenical prayer breakfast remarks.

203 A liberal found this out “Not Impressed with Right Wing Scholarship,” by arensb at DailyKos.com, May 17, 2011. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/17/976735/-Not-Impressed-with-Right-Wing-Scholarship

203 committing historical fouls for ideological reasons This chapter was partly inspired by conversations with the historian Rick Perlstein, including a Point of Inquiry podcast with him on June 20, 2011, http://www.pointofinquiry.org/rick_perlstein_is_there_a_republican_war_on_history/.

203 “warned the British” For details see Glenn Kessler, “Sarah Palin’s Midnight Ride, Twice Over,” June 6, 2011. Available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/sarah-palins-midnight-ride-twice-over/2011/06/06/AGIsoJKH_blog.html.

204 “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more” For a strong refutation see Glenn Kessler, “Bachmann on slavery and the national debt,” The Washington Post, January 28, 2011. Available online at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/01/bachmann_on_slavery_and_the_na.html.

204 “Founding Father” See ABC News, “John Quincy Adams a Founding Father? Michele Bachmann Says Yes,” June 28, 2011. Available online at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/john-quincy-adams-a-founding-father-michele-bachmann-says-yes/.

204 social studies curriculum Texas Education Agency/Board of Education. Texas Administrative Code, Title 19, Part II. Chapter 113, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies, Subchapter C., High School. Available online at http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/ch113c.html#113.32.

205 “wall of separation between Church and State” Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, January 1, 1802. Available online at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.

205 “you’ve got to teach creation science” For the video of Barton making this claim, see Right Wing Watch, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-founding-fathers-were-against-teaching-evolution-american-revolution-was-fought-slave.

205 American fundamentalist invention For the definitive history of American “creation science” see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

206 “the unthinking assumption” John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, Revised Third Edition, 2002, p. 9.

207 “a much more empirical, Enlightenment based history” Chris Mooney interview with Rick Perlstein, Point of Inquiry podcast, June 20, 2011. Available online at http://www.pointofinquiry.org/rick_perlstein_is_there_a_republican_war_on_history/.

207 The basic story of how this happened For this summary of historiography I have been influenced by John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, Revised Third Edition, 2002, and also by the blog “Spinning Clio: Musings of an Independent Historian,” and this entry in particular: “Introduction to Historical Method: History of Historical Method,” August 24, 2005. http://cliopolitical.blogspot.com/2005/08/introduction-to-historical-method_24.html.

208 a forgery Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, Translated by G.W. Bowersock, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

208 “merely to show how things actually were” For historicism and von Ranke, see John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, Revised Third Edition, 2002, p. 6–12.

209 18.9 to 1 Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” 2007 working paper.

210 “politicized history” Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1994.

210 “revisionist history” See CNN, “Bush confident of finding banned Iraqi weapons,” June 18, 2003. Available online at http://articles.cnn.com/2003–06–17/politics/bush.iraq_1_biological-weapons-iraq-war-iraqi-threat?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS.

210 causus belli For a history of Bush’s shifting rationales for war, see Marc Sandalow, “Record shows Bush shifting in Iraq war,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2004. Available online at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/29/BUSH.TMP&ao=all.

210 Zinn’s account Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, New York: HarperCollins, 1980 (first edition).

210 “bad history” Michael Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” Dissent, Spring 2004. Available online at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=385.

211 internment For a historical account, see Stetson Conn, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast,” Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/conn.html.

211 “herd ‘em up” Quoted in David Neiwert, Strawberry Days: How internment destroyed a Japanese American community, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, p. 121.

211 “an enemy race” Quoted in Roger Daniels et al, eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986, p. 82.

212 the right-wing answer Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror, Washington, D.C: Regnery, 2004.

212 “speculation” Eric Muller, “Indefensible Internment,” Reason, December 2004. Available online at http://reason.com/archives/2004/12/01/indefensible-internment.

212 “several decades of scholarly research” Statement from the Historians’ Committee for Fairness on Michelle Malkin, August 31, 2004. This was previously available online at http://historynewsnetwork.gmu.edu/readcomment.php?id=40982. But the link has died. One record of the statement is on Malkin’s own blog: http://michellemalkin.com/2004/09/01/book-buzz-3/

212 one sweeping book of bad right-wing history Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2004.

213 “not as analysis but as catechism” David Greenberg, “History for Dummies,” Slate, March 11, 2005. Available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2114713/.

213 David Barton For one essay on the misinformation that has been sown by Barton see Rob Boston, “David Barton: Master of Myth and Misinformation,” June 1996, http://www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9606/barton.html.

214 God told him to start working David Barton, America: To Pray? Or Not to Pray? 5th Edition, 2nd Printing. Aledo, Texas: WallBuilder Press, February 1995.

214 Jefferson set aside land For a debunking of these claims, see Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus, Volume I, available online at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_FINAL.pdf. Quotation from p. xiv.

214 Treaty of Tripoli For the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, see the Avalon Project at Yale Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp.

214 Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, January 1, 1802. Available online at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.

215 “makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government” The documentation of Barton making this claim about Jefferson’s letter is in Nate Blakeslee, “King of the Christocrats,” Texas Monthly, September, 2006.

215 “men of little faith” Cecelia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 1955), pp. 3–43.

215 “they weren’t all going to fit one book” Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus, Volume I, available online at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_FINAL.pdf. Quotation from p. xiv.