A patriot's history of the United States

History hasn’t been this interesting since 5th-6th grade in Miss Michael’s class in little Forreston, Illinois. My husband and I are thoroughly enjoying A patriot’s history of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. And I’m still in the pre-USA days of New Spain, New France and New England, a period longer than our post-revolution years. An excellent reminder of how the colonial powers that searched for wealth and sent settlers all had very different systems. I love becoming reacquainted with all those names of the conquistadores we had to memorize and their incredible explorations, visions and dreams of wealth that lead them nowhere. Even the Italian Columbus died in poverty.

Spain stole gold mined by the Indians for their rulers and kept it all in the hands of the government. Spain was vastly outnumbered by the Indians, but it was able to defeat them through advanced technology and a superior social/cultural/political system which wasn‘t dependent of a rigid hierarchy of power. France too searched for a passage to wealth, but ended up bartering with the Indians for another kind, furs--so apparently even Indians could be influenced by greed (shock and awe!)--but didn’t do the hard work except for exploration and founding a few outposts along rivers. Also, France’s peasants were better off than those in England or Spain, so they had little interest in relocating to the unknown, difficult wilds of New France.  The few French Protestants that crossed seeking religious freedom were slaughtered by the Spanish even after founding colonies.

England got in the game late, and English pirates (I think in school these were called by the nicer term “privateers”) stole from the Spanish what they’d already stolen from the Indians. The authors don’t say it that way--that’s my interpretation. But the English had a different idea of wealth than the Spanish--grow it. They only of the colonial powers understood that wealth could be increased and developed, that it wasn’t a fixed commodity to be hoarded by the royal family. Hmm. Isn’t that interesting. Everyone’s wealth belongs to the government and don‘t take risks--a failed colonial (European) system except for a tiny island of entrepreneurs and investors that saw wealth differently.

From the publisher‘s page: “For at least thirty years, high school and college students have been taught to be embarrassed by American history. Required readings have become skewed toward a relentless focus on our country’s darkest moments, from slavery to McCarthyism. As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln; more to My Lai than to the American Revolution; more to the internment of Japanese Americans than to the liberation of Europe in World War II.”

Yes, since the 1970s when the homegrown, anti-American faculty wonks began to take over the college humanities and social science departments with the media and entertainment culture of TV and movies adding the icing, U.S. young people have been fed a steady diet of guilt, shame and lies. Marxists and socialists had been down this road in the 1930s and had to pause to fight the common enemy in WWII to save the Soviet Union.  But they had a vision, and it's coming to fruition today.  No wonder this book is a best seller and used by home-schooling parents whose children go on to out perform public school graduates. It’s a breath of fresh air.