Review Of Jill Lepore's The Whites Of Their Eyes

"We need not destroy the past. It is gone" a quote by American music theorist, writer, and philosopher John Cage. I believe history is a compelling subject for anyone to study. Harvard historian, and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore's book "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History" annotates the centuries-long story of America's founding. The story adduces and breaks down many pivotal events in the nation's history such as the Tea Party battle and the adoption of a "social-studies curriculum" by Texas' board of education. Throughout her book Lepore manages to exceptionally acknowledge the nation's struggle for independence within the eighteenth-century. The author also makes sure to briefly record when anti-socialists, conservatives, Christian democrats, classical liberals, and nationalists (political right) began dispelling their reactionary history around. The book does well in explicating how when no one could come to terms with a story pertaining to the nation's unruly foundnation, the political right made its own imagined past by depicting a time less troubled by strife and uncertainty. An "ideal"

For example; the notion that teaches the United States was established as a Christian nation. Moreover, Lepore’s book also helps put the "Tea Party" sentiment into perspective as a historical act. In her book Lepore writes “...it had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s. But it did have a great deal to do with what happened in the 1970s...” (68). I intrepret this as the author explaining to us how the events of the past were not as significant as their later retellings made them out to