Books: Great (not) history

I'm rather taken by the History News Network's poll of the the least credible history books in print. Granted this was a biased and short-lived poll, but still...

First of all, the title to take top honors was Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. In this book, the author points out such mistaken ideas as the one that TJ believed that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. TJ thinking that the government and religion should not be the same thing? Well, shut yo' mouth! The very idea! I'm going to postulate that any book labeled nonfiction that has a Foreword by Glenn Beck is yet another category altogether, namely, nonnonfiction, where you just make stuff up because you like it that way.

It's curious how a lot of people who want religion in government want to use the Founders as the source for this idea. Whether or not we should or shouldn't, and whether or not it's a good idea (and please note how neutral my language is), the Founders, the guys like Jefferson and Adams and Washington and Franklin, did not wish to blend religion with government. Not no how, not no way. Get over it. In our world today, we use whatever we like of Founderism to prove that we should do a certain thing, and usually we pretend that contrary ideas are not those of the Founders. (Certain members of SCOTUS are notorious for this.) But to create Founderistic beliefs whole cloth that are contrary to their ideas? That's the American way!

What the interwebs were more interested in about the poll than second-rate history making stuff up was that Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States came in a close second. Talk about a totally different animal. No one questions Zinn's history; what they object to is his hypothesis. I know a lot of people who strongly admire Zinn's leftist interpretation of history. After all, he's a real historian who doesn't make stuff up. But you know something? I'm going to side with the least credible contingent on this one. I could not read this book (and I'm a big history book buff). The interpretation of the facts was so heavy-handed that I wanted to find the author and hit him over the head with it. Lighten up, Howie! I mean, I may not be a card-carrying communist, but I'm as much a left wingnut as the next guy. But not when the next guy is the late Howard Zinn.

If you haven't looked at Zinn's book, give it a try. It's obviously controversial. You can tell the pinkness of your diapers by how much you buy into it. For the details of the poll as a whole, read What is the Least Credible History Book in Print?
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