Books about us history5/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Prof Cowie reads this history as a continuous struggle between local control and independence from national authority as the key to the freedom to oppress versus fitful and often unsuccessful, although sometimes decisive, intervention by the federal government to enforce the law to protect minorities. It is remarkably sweeping, tracing patterns of freedom as the right to dominate in Wallace's homeland of Barbour County in south-eastern Alabama during four key historical periods: the brutal white invasion of Alabama and dispossession of the indigenous Creek Nation resulting in the infamous Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing violent resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War the savage reimposition of white supremacy and segregation and efforts to preserve that system despite the civil rights movement and anti-discrimination mandates from the federal government. The Kevin McCarthy spectacle bodes ill for the USįreedom’s Dominion begins and essentially ends with Wallace, an arch-segregationist (whose eventual repentance is another story). The presumed loss of an assumed privilege of white Christian national pre-eminence is the primal fuel driving the Maga faction and its allies and antecedents. Prof Cowie builds on the insight, best developed by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, that for many white Americans, and other some dominant communities around the world, “freedom” has meant the prerogative to oppress, dispossess, enslave or abuse others in the pursuit of the crudest individual and communal self-interest. Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie is a breakthrough in situating the Trump movement in its broadest historical context, though briefly acknowledging that is left for the very end of the book. ![]() Whether he knows it or not, Mr Trump's most immediate precursor was Wallace, whose attitudes and agenda he often seems to channel in a kind of uncanny demagogic seance. This return of the repressed had obvious way stations in Richard Nixon's “southern strategy” in 1968 that welcomed pro-segregation forces into the Republican Party, the rise of Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh and his talk radio imitators, and, especially, Alabama governor George Wallace until he was crippled by a would-be assassin in 1972. The Donald Trump movement that culminated in a failed coup and the January 6 insurrection, attacking the constitution and the state in the name of patriotism and “freedom”, was the culmination of a lengthy resurgence of white grievance and resentments. State troopers break up a demonstration march with tear gas in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Several new books shed important light on this intensifying struggle. While liberals use the institutional power of universities and the entertainment industry to promote their preferred storylines, Republican state legislatures are using the coercive force of government to outlaw teaching about the most unflattering aspects of US history - slavery, segregation and racism - plus gender and sexuality. The increasingly bitter contests over historical narratives now exemplify the deepest divisions in a fracturing US. At their most instructive and useful, national histories function like tapestries that knit together many narrative strands, both consensus and contested.
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