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Exploring Forgotten America
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18532 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
3,464 Words |
| Author
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John C. Chalberg
John C. Chalberg teaches American history at Normandale
Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. |
REDISVOCERING AMERICA
Roger Kennedy
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990
398 pp., $24.95
Pernicious was the operative adjective for Roger Kennedy as he set about his task of rediscovering America. When pernicious myths were not in need of puncturing, there were pernicious simplicities blocking the path to historical understanding and pernicious stereotypes cluttering a landscape crowded with too many cases of myth-taken identity.
A discovered America is an America whose history stretches barely to Columbus and more (or less) accurately to Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. A rediscovered America is an America laced with ingenious pyramids both of which were built by pre-Columbian settlers. A discovered America is an America of wondrous parchments outlining political liberties. A rediscovered America is an America of architectural curiosities revealing material versions of expressions at once derivative and inventive.
A discovered America is an America of conquerors and exploiters, mostly white. A rediscovered America is an America of borrowers and imitators, many of whom were also white and all of whom preferred learning from the Indian to destroying him. A discovered America is an America that is almost entirely white and almost invariably English. A rediscovered America is not only red and black, but Spanish and French as well. Finally, a discovered America is an America to which a revolutionary-minded Thomas Jefferson gave his reading of Lockean individualism. A rediscovered American is an America in which an anguished and surprisingly cautious Thomas Jefferson tried to live an orderly life amid storms at once political and psychological.
If all this sounds perniciously pretentious, it is not. Roger Kennedy does question the traditional story line of a once discovered America. He also urges his readers to look for discoverers who preceded Christopher Columbus. He will even remind those who travel with him that new discoveries wait anyone willing to hunt for them. But he is never so bold as to assert that his truths are the only truths--or so pernicious as to pretend that any people's history is finally recoverable--or re-discoverable.
Nor is Kennedy in the often ideological business of revising the past to suit the needs of the present. At the very least he wants to pretend that "this book is not deliberately
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