The historians are concerned. We now live in a post-truth world, one in which “alternative facts” hold freight while inconvenient truths can be dismissed as “fake news.” In this “age of disinformation,” as Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer characterize it, nefarious actors distort the historical record without compunction. The vanishingly thin line between fact and fiction, truth and untruth, Kruse and Zelizer insist, sits at the center of the interlocking political crises in which Americans now find themselves.
Now Kruse and Zelizer have assembled some of their most esteemed colleagues to set the record straight. Their new edited collection, Myth America, looks to debunk certain “legends and lies” about the American past—from the idea that “the framers believed in ‘republics’ but disdained ‘democracy’ ” (dismantled in an essay by Akhil Reed Amar) to the notion that activists used “good” (mild and inoffensive) protest tactics during the Black freedom struggle of the mid-20th century (handled in a piece by Glenda Gilmore). Only by grappling with the past as it actually happened, Kruse and Zelizer assert, can Americans “understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.”
