‘I’ve dealt with fake history before, but not….’

” ‘I don’t know that Trump has historical awareness at all,’ Fitzhugh Brundage, the chair of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me…. ‘I’ve had any number of colleagues say they feel recommitted and energized to do what they do, because of its very importance now.’

“Brundage told me that he has fought against ‘fake history’ for decades; in the 1980s, he often heard bizarre claims related to Pearl Harbor — that Franklin Roosevelt intentionally allowed the Japanese to attack or tried suppressing information about a potential attack and whether it would bring the U.S. into the war. ‘Every now and then Reagan made weird statements, like having been there when they liberated concentration camps,’ Brundage said. ‘But that may have been the onset of Alzheimer’s. All of which is to say: I’ve dealt with fake history before, but not sustained by a President adding to it.’ ”

— From “Teaching Southern and Black History Under Trump” by in the New Yorker (Feb. 2)

This just in: yet another contribution to the archives of fake history….

 

Harry Watson notes underbelly of popular democracy

“Popular democracy is central to America’s identity, mission, and well-being, but it is also highly vulnerable to racism and irrationality,” [says] Harry Watson, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of ‘Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America.’

“Jackson was an unapologetic slave owner and allowed the forcible removal of Cherokees (the so-called Trail of Tears) so Georgia could claim millions of acres that the federal government had guaranteed to the Cherokees. His policies were sometimes irrational, such as opposing building roads and canals that were transforming the young nation. The forcible removal of native Americans from their land has since tarnished Jackson’s image.”

— From “Five lessons 1828 holds for a Trump presidency” by Laurent Belsie in the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 9)