First let me make clear that I am not a History Channel hater. I spent a year happily writing and editing entries for “This Day in the American Revolution” on their website. I have complete confidence that more people have read my prose in that forum than all my appearances in peer-reviewed journals combined.My son’s teacher let the kids forgo their nightly reading if they watched the History Channel’s Mankind series’ treatment of the “Age of Empire.” He warned it might be gory and asked that a parent watch with each child. Thus I found myself forced to suffer through some of the worst history and worst television I have ever endured.
Thanks to clunky editing, I learned that the Pilgrims fled the Tulip bubble in the Netherlands. Salem drew the “era of fear and superstition” to a welcome close so the “wilderness” could be “tamed” from Siberia to North America by rugged, male, entrepreneurial pioneers desirous of fur. As “superstition is giving way to science,” Captain James Cook, “mankind’s greatest explorer . . . opened up a new continent,” inhabited by “animals and plants unknown to science.” Benjamin Franklin, “innovator and entrepreneur,” brought the scientific revolution to “America.” And the march of progress goes on.
Posts
