Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
DON’T KNOW
MUCH ABOUT
®
HISTORY
ANNIVERSARY EDITION
EVERYTHING
YOU NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY
BUT NEVER LEARNED
KENNETH C. DAVIS
Dedication
To my children, Jenny and Colin
Contents
Preface to the Anniversary Edition
Chapter 2 - Say You Want a Revolution
Chapter 3 - Growth of a Nation: From the Creation of the Constitution to Manifest Destiny
Chapter 4 - Apocalypse Then: To Civil War and Reconstruction
Chapter 5 - When Monopoly Wasn’t a Game: The Growing Empire from the Wild West to World War I
Chapter 6 - Boom to Bust to Big Boom: From the Jazz Age and the Great Depression to Hiroshima
Chapter 7 - Commies, Containment, and Cold War: America in the Fifties
Chapter 8 - The Torch Is Passed: From Camelot to Hollywood on the Potomac
Chapter 9 - From the Evil Empire to the Axis of Evil
Appendix 1 - The Bill of Rights and Other Constitutional Amendments
Appendix 2 - Is the Electoral College a Party School? A Presidential Election Primer
Appendix 3 - U.S. Presidents and Their Administrations
Preface to the Anniversary Edition
An Era of Broken Trust
W
hen
Don’t Know Much About
®
History
was first published in 1990, it was simply meant to serve as a fresh new take on American history. Busting myths, with a dose of humor and real stories about real people, the book was conceived as an antidote to the dull, dreary textbooks we suffered through in high school or college. A year later, in July 1991, the book began a run of thirty-five consecutive weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list, proving perhaps that Americans don’t hate history—they just hate the dull version they got back in high school.
In 2002, the book was revised and greatly expanded. Now, at the end of 2010, this newly updated edition picks up where that second revision left off—with the bizarre drama of the 2000 presidential election and the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks—and brings American history through a churning period of war, calamity, and dramatic upheaval that culminated with the historic 2008 election of Barack Obama and his first year and a half in office.
So what’s different about this new revised, updated version? Like the original book and the previous revision, this new edition is organized along chronological lines, moving from America’s “discovery” by Europeans to more recent events, including the first Gulf War, the end of the Cold War, the enormous repercussions of September 11, 2001, and the election of the nation’s first African American president. But the book’s final chapter, which was initially written for the 2002 edition, has been significantly expanded to include a review of the extraordinary events that have taken place since 2001, a brief period that has produced some of the most remarkable changes in America’s history.
Much of this new history reflects on the response of the United States to the calamity of 9/11 and how that day has transformed American life and society, from the way we get through airports to fundamental American attitudes about the right to privacy versus a sense of greater security. The new material begins with an overview of 9/11 and what has been learned about that “day of infamy” after nearly a decade. This revision goes on to recap the response of the Bush administration to 9/11, with particular emphasis on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
In addition, this added material includes discussions of the following events and controversies:
• The emergence of same-sex marriage as a highly divisive, emotional national issue
• The failure of government at every level in responding to Hurricane Katrina, America’s worst natural disaster
• The meltdown of the global economy and the “Great Recession” and the historic involvement of the government in rescuing companies, such as General Motors and Citibank, deemed “too big to fail”
• The surprisingly meteoric rise and election of Barack Obama
Besides adding material to cover events that have occurred since this book originally appeared in 1990, I have amplified some of the existing material. This sort of “historical revision” is a necessity because we learn things about the past all the time, often based on new scholarship, scientific advances, and ongoing discoveries that reshape our view of history. For instance, new light has been cast on familiar stories, such as the continuing archaeological dig that is revealing new information about the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia—first discovered in 1996—or the DNA evidence that strongly suggests that Thomas Jefferson had fathered the children of slave Sally Hemings—a nineteenth-century political rumor now treated as near certainty, even at Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia.
This revision also reflects the fact that court decisions can greatly alter American life. A bevy of judicial decisions around the nation during the past eight years has forced a major debate on same-sex marriage as well as the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward homosexuals serving in the military. And in June 2008, the majority on an increasingly conservative Supreme Court struck down a Washington, D.C., ban on handguns in a historic reinterpretation of the Second Amendment and “the right to bear arms” that may impact gun-control laws in most American states.
Finally, history needs to be revised because even “old dog” historians learn new tricks. For instance, in researching and writing two of my recent books,
America’s Hidden History
and
A Nation Rising
, I uncovered some surprising “hidden history” in such stories as the fate of the true first Pilgrims—French Huguenots who settled in Florida fifty years before the
Mayflower
sailed and were wiped out by the Spanish in 1565. Or the story of Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant “Bible Riots” of 1844, another episode missing from most American schoolbooks. This revision now reflects these significant but overlooked events.
When I last revised this book in 2002, I concluded by writing:
And yet, how much had really changed? Congress still fights over obscure bills. Children still go missing. The stock market’s gyrations transfix the nation. But something fundamental seems to have changed. Historians may look back at America in late 2002 as the Era of Broken Trust. In a very short space of time, Americans had lost faith in government agencies, including the FBI and the CIA. The church, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, was devastated by a string of revelations about predatory priests. Corporate bankruptcies and revelations of corruption involving Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and WorldCom, among others, shattered America’s faith in the financial security of the nation.
As we know, that paragraph has become, if anything, even more salient in 2010. The “Era of Broken Trust” I described at the beginning of the twenty-first century has only worsened as the events of the past decade have further eroded many Americans’ belief and confidence in the nation’s most basic institutions. The tremendous upheaval in the global economy shook our trust in the financial institutions and the government agencies—many born out of the Great Depression—that were supposed to regulate and police them. The deceptions and mistaken assumptions that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq continued to weigh the nation down in a costly war. The response to Hurricane Katrina at every level of government was a national disgrace that called into question the ability and commitment of people entrusted with the nation’s basic safety. And the woes of the Gulf Coast following Katrina were compounded in 2010 by one of the worst environmental disasters in American history: an oil well nearly a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico relentlessly spewed crude oil, befouling beaches, destroying sensitive ecosystems, killing wildlife, and ruining businesses in a catastrophe whose ultimate costs and long-term impact may never be fully known.
Perhaps the best summary of what this period in our history may mean is captured in something President George Bush said on
Good Morning America
on September 1, 2005, during the Katrina catastrophe: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”
Of course, that was not true, as ample evidence has shown. There had been plenty of cautions about the levees from the public officials, engineers, and academics who had warned of the dangers confronting New Orleans as its protective barrier islands were eliminated by development and the levees ringing a city below sea level were deemed insufficient in the face of a major storm. Similarly, many danger signs had been posted about a raft of other protective “levees” that have also been breached—the risks to the financial system, or the concerns about offshore drilling, and the dire warnings about going into Iraq without justification and without proper troop levels.
But just as there is a danger in complacent acceptance of what “they” tell us—whether “they” are corporations, governments, doctors, or churches—there is also a pernicious side effect to the mistrust that has been sown by this record of “official” deceptions. While many people have become disgusted with the “system” or have grown cynical, many others have become all the more susceptible to “alternative” truths.
Americans have always been fascinated and even drawn to “conspiracy theories.” In the early nineteenth century, a widely accepted belief among mainstream American Protestants held that Roman Catholics—especially Irish Catholics—were attempting to take over the American government and install the pope in a new Vatican to be built in Cincinnati. At the time, that belief drove anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic rage to violent heights. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, rumors of a wide-ranging conspiracy began almost immediately—and they have never fully gone away.
This tendency toward conjuring up a malevolent, elaborate, and often wildly complex web of conspiracy in almost every decision or event in our times has multiplied
virally
in the Internet age. The best example—addressed in the new material added to the final chapter of this book—is the belief that the terrorist strikes of 9/11 and the death and destruction at the twin towers and Pentagon were part of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated within the American government. While I address that question in the text, I would like to say unequivocally that I consider it a dangerous lie. In rereading the reams of testimony about the terror strikes and in the excellent journalism of such writers as Lawrence Wright in
The Looming Tower
or James Bamford in
Body of Secrets
, even the most skeptical readers will find the truth—if that is what they seek.
