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OK, there's about ten things I should be doing right now, from baking someone a get-well pie to taxes to figuring out housing for the NAGCR AGM. But I got to reading the list of the U.S. presidents as snack foods, which funny and swawesome and you should read it. However, it is much too kind to Millard Fillmore who, in addition to being regularly ranked as America's worst president (present company excepted), had a second career as a professional xenophobe which everyone forgets about...
This, in turn, got me thinking about my tenth-grade history textbook, The American Pageant (edition of, yikes, like 1994.) Generally very good! But had some weird habits, notably consigning certain events to what I'm not sure is damnatio memoriae or whitewashing. Like the picture of crazed Know-Nothings "campaigning for their xenophobic, anti-Catholic candidate"...without noting that that candidate was ex-president Millard Fillmore.
Or the fact that it referred to "the assassin's bullet that killed Hamilton" without noting the famous name of that assassin.
It's like that chunk of the textbook fell out of some alternate universe where somebody else shot Hamilton.*( Read more... )
This, in turn, got me thinking about my tenth-grade history textbook, The American Pageant (edition of, yikes, like 1994.) Generally very good! But had some weird habits, notably consigning certain events to what I'm not sure is damnatio memoriae or whitewashing. Like the picture of crazed Know-Nothings "campaigning for their xenophobic, anti-Catholic candidate"...without noting that that candidate was ex-president Millard Fillmore.
Or the fact that it referred to "the assassin's bullet that killed Hamilton" without noting the famous name of that assassin.
It's like that chunk of the textbook fell out of some alternate universe where somebody else shot Hamilton.*( Read more... )
