Rewriting History

AMERICAN HISTORY, from the time it began being made and written about, has generally tended to be written from a very patriotic, pro-American point of view. This is called "hagiography", history which is written by someone who has a very favorable, biased, positive atttidue tuwards his subject matter,whether it be a person, a country, or an institution. Bias is a problem in historical research and writing, as it tends to be in most endeavors. Bias produces hagiography, which gives people a false history, and thus, false attitudes and beliefs about history. A passive, happy population, brainwashed on phony feel good history, is not a good thing. I was raised on American historical hagiography. So were every other American public school student from the nation's founding to, oh, say, the late twentieth century. Our blessed republic was painted as a proverbial shining city on a hill, the essence of human goodness and progress. Intellectual revolutions of one kind or another took place in all areas of research and academic endeavor in the middle to late twentieth century, including medicine, science, and the arts; why not in the writing of American history as well? Well, it did. And so it came to be that increasing numbers of baby boomer historians began seeking a better, more realistic, historically accurate and balanced description of the nation's past. Thus, what was once a glorious herioic westward expansion of the true civilization has been rewrirren and retold as genocide and territorial theft and conquest. Slavery, once presented as a "peculiar" institution with certain benefits and advantages for all involved in it, slaves included, suffered a diminished reputation when modern historians finally decided to "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (tell it as it was), and to stop the whitewashing of a cruel, brutal, tragic history and legacy. The reason why conservatives today want to eliminate all mantion of race and sexual orientation in public schools is because society, and thus schools, are more willing nowadays to teach truth, not hagiography. They (conservatives) also want to throw out all accurate honest hsitory as "anti-American", because it does not flatter the United States, and return to the good old days of simplistic, whitewashed hagiography of our parents, grandparents, and so forth, back through history. Conservatives are traditionalists, and they want to be proud, not ashamed of their nation's history and traditions. At the Smithsonian musuem of American history, for instance, American slavery is depicted is stark, blunt, honest, accurate terms. No sparing of anybody's feelings. All exhibits at the Smothsonian are genuine, not fake replicas. Extremly conservative, patriotic people, like, say, Donald Trump, along with evidently millions of other lovers of American hagiography, are offended that the nation's historical museum dares show and tell the truth about slavery, about its deep insinuation into American society and history, its horrible cruelty and brutality, its lingering endurance today. Trump, MAGA is going to remodel the Smithsonian, and bring back mythoogical American greatness. Make America look great again. Slavery will once again give comfort and pride to us, as good Americans, rather than horror, moral outrage, and disgust. By the time Herr Trump gets done with us, we the American people will be proud, proud as all hell, of our great country, past and present. Our American leader will do a better job of this than his role models and heroes, Hitler and Stalin.