Currently reading
400 Years Of Freethought
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America
The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
The tone may have been inevitable. Limerick wrote in 1987, so she had not only the heroic, Turnerian history of the west to debunk, but the even more wildly out-of-touch Reagan western myth. The attack she mounts on the normal view of the west is split between history and more current events; Limerick advocates for the continuity of western history to the present, and for the use of current newspapers as “primary sources” for that current view. Since most of these issues were particularly intense in the 1970s and 1980s, the reader needs to work a little, to bring them up to date.
