This author and blogger has been a scholar of American history for the past half century, since 1972.
My life has been one of research, writing, publishing, giving interviews, and teaching college and university students the facts, the reality, the truth of American history, in all of its glory but also of its travails and shortcomings.
As any scholar in any field, the essential point is to expand the truth, the knowledge, and the reality of the American past, with no allowance for censorship or interference with what books are promoted in the quest for the truth of the American past.
Sadly, American history was badly distorted until the 1960s, with the “Lost Cause” of the Confederate South being permitted to dominate curriculums at all levels of American education, from elementary level through middle school, high school, and even at universities.
The distortion of the truth about the American past was a crime, finally overcome, and transforming the understanding of America’s past for the generations since the rise of the civil rights movement.
The liberation of knowledge meant not only the reality of the African American past, but also that of Hispanic-Latino history, women’s history, labor history, environmental history, and the role of gender and sexuality, have all become part of the total story of America.
The goal has been to liberate America from a white Christian domination of knowledge, which even left people of other religious faiths, as ignored, until recent decades.
We as a society cannot permit the myths of the past to become predominant again, and to disease the minds of the young, so as to promote prejudice, discrimination, and narrowmindedness!
That would be the prescription for the return of the criminal lies and deceit that affected understanding of American History from the era of the Civil War in the 1860s through the next century!
We are faced with the evil motives of politicians in the Republican Party to revive the past mythology!
I, for one, will NOT allow myself to promote and promulgate anything other than the truth, the facts, the reality of the American past, as I move forward into the future, still dedicated to inspiring students about the total, valid story of the American past!