Ron Radosh: The Dangers of Politicized Conservative History

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College. He is a Presidential appointment to the Public Information Declassification Board, for a term extending from 2007 to 2010. He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997) and Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001).]

Having spent a good deal of time writing about the crude left-wing history of our country by charlatans like Howard Zinn and Oliver Stone, I have become wary of politicized history in general, whether it comes from the precincts of the far Left or the far Right.

This time the culprits are on the Right, one of the biggest examples being Glenn Beck.  On this website, some time ago, I wrote about Beck’s failure to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.  A Senior Editor of Reason, my friend Michael Moynihan, wrote about Beck’s history and insightfully pointed out that a “tiny bit of knowledge…combined with an enormous Fox News constituency and an unflappable trust in one’s own wisdom, is a dangerous thing. Beck doesn’t demonstrate the perils of auto didacticism, but the perils of learning the subject while at the same time attempting to teach it.”

Now, from the precincts of the left, come two important critiques of both Beck’s and the Tea Party’s historical narrative.  The first is a new book from Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian of America’s colonial and revolutionary period.  Her book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, should be required reading....