ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (WITH APOLOGIES TO NORMAN MAILER.)

In Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a book I published in 2005, I undertook in the second chapter to analyze three major college American History texts, each of which went through many editions and revisions, to demonstrate the ways in which the historical profession sought over some decades to adjust its original story of America to changing social pressures and political orthodoxies without, however, altering the basic structure of the story. In the third chapter, I started again from scratch and wrote what I called the true story of America as I had learned it from my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts. What I was attempting to demonstrate was that no matter how you tweaked the old story, it was still the wrong story and hence had to be completely rejected, not improved edition by edition.

 

Almost nobody has read that book, I am sorry to say, although I think I did a good job in it. If you are interested, you can find it archived on box.net, which can be reached by the link at the top of the main page of this blog. The two chapters together are only 30,000 words long, and it is a very easy read. I recommend it