New history books tell ‘the rest of the story’

Bill Knight column for Nov. 1, 2 or 3, 2018

Two new books about U.S. history are readable works that both fill in the blank about a nation whose “official” past omits a lot. They also each depict the country as a multiple personality, a struggling contradiction, and a struggle.

The first is “The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America,” by 36-year-old history professor Dawson Barrett of Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, a downstate Illinois native. A 232-page gem, “The Defiant” explores big policy shifts of what Barrett sees as a new Gilded Age through the lens of dissent: picket lines, protest marches, and sit-ins in factories and lunch counters, in the streets and countryside. It’s comparable to a handful of classic history titles that tell “the rest of the story,” notably, Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and Dick Gregory’s “No More Lies.”

Barrett says, “The history of the United States is a history of conflict. It is also, however, a history of defiance, dissent and opposition to the status quo. The world is a legacy of struggles won and lost: free speech, slavery, voting rights, child labor, and segregation among them. [Protests] create opportunities for education, employment, recreation, and leisure. They dictate our access to health care, food, shelter, clean air and water. They define our relationships to our government, our jobs, our communities, our friends and our lovers. They decide the quality of our lives.

The book is divided into five sections – on the environment, youth culture, labor, war/peace, and poverty/economic justice – with an epilogue touching on immigration/refugees, “fake news,” and Trump-era issues.

“Protest movements are challenges to the powerful by people without other means,” he continues. And “this book examines U.S. protest movements in the Post-Liberal Era, a period in which neoliberal government policies have returned the U.S. economy to a raw, brutal and largely unrestrained form that is similar in many ways to the Gilded Age which predated the New Deal.”

The other contemporary classic is “These Truths: A History of the United States” by Harvard University history professor and New Yorker magazine staffer Jill Lepore. More than four times longer than Barrett’s book, it’s an insightful and comprehensive chronicle that corrects and augments the record.

“A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes.

Divided into four sections progressing from our founding (“The Idea”), to the antebellum era and Civil War (“The People”), to the rise of the federal structure (“The State”), to the decades since World War II (“The Machine,” referring to the age of computers), the massive examination of our roots reveals the inherent oxymoron of repression and division in the Land of Liberty and Equality.

“The United States rests on a dedication to equality,” she writes. But “between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other lies an uneasy path.”

That path is more easily seen and navigated with perceptive roadmaps such as Lepore’s and Barrett’s valuable efforts.