The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim
to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they
were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book
tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of
the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn
Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America."

Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a wry
and bemused look at American history according to the far right, from
the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas
School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that
the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she
provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independence-
the real one, that is. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary
history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what
story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings.
Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even
heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past--a time less troubled by ambiguity,
strife, and uncertainty--a yearning for an America that never was.

The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative
about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally,
a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously
antipluralist.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at
Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her books include New
York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan,
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Name of War: King Philip's War and
the Origins of American Identity, winner of the Bancroft Prize.

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