Dressed in colonial garb and looking like reincarnations of Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross, members of the political movement known as the Tea Party have gone bonkers about history and link their conservative agenda to the Founding Fathers. Reality-based historians are aghast at this misreading of the past and by the Tea Party’s farfetched assertion that George Washington and Co. were actually conservatives; as historians point out, rather than reactionaries eager to maintain the status quo through budgetary restraint, Washington, Paine, Franklin, et al. were actually radicals and revolutionaries. Ladies and Gentleman: Welcome to the so-called “History Wars,” a cultural phenomenon that is even now shaping young-adult fiction.
Jerry Griswold on the American Revolution in Young Adult Fiction:
http://blog.parents-choice.org/?p=1018
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