history

historiography and story: fiction or fact?

Historicity and Myth, especially the set of national myths, such as those promulgated by Jules Micheletm Jacob Burckhard.[1]

We can add the list, the myth promulgated by the MAGA Trump movement, which cannot specify when the USA was great. Was it Jefferson’s Louisanna Purchase? The Gold Rush of 1849? The era when only white men could vote? Victory in World War II? The availability of manufacturing jobs in the 1950’s?

Renaissance

A 19th century poetical term unknown to the people at that time.

renaissance

Reformation

A term that had historical validity for the people at that time.

America

Named for South America before North America was stumbled upon by accident, which has been mythically recast as a "discovery".

Constitution

Similar to laws or so fundamentally out-of-date that it prevents laws from improving the country?

Founding Fathers

Slaveholders and financiers who benefited from slaveholding.[2] .

See also a more recent book with a similar approach, but that focuses on how the Populism of Andrew Jackson accelerated the decline of the Southern Planter class.[3] .

Footnotes

1. See also the "Myth and Symbol" school of literary history and USA studies by professors such as Henry Nash Smith, John William Ward, Michael Paul Rogin, and Richard Slotkin.
2. Consider the progressive historiography of Charles A. Beard at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Beard#Progressive_historiography
3. Charles Sellers The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846, Oxford University Press, 1991 at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-market-revolution-9780195089202?cc=us&lang=en&