Your Assignment: Teach Laura Bush About U.S. History

AP/Yahoo: “Mrs. Bush said although the report was damaging, Newsweek should not be held solely responsible”:

“In the United States if there’s a terrible report, people don’t riot and kill other people. …”

I’m racking my brain, index finger sturdily resting on my chin, head tilting to the right. Can you recall any riots and killings throughout U.S. history that we might share with our First Lady?

More below : : :
KENT STATE just for starters. Mrs. Bush might put Philip Caputo’s new book on her list of must-reads. Well, she’d remember except she was dealing at the time (oh, that’s so awful).

The Civil War? The labor riots? The Haymarket Riots? The civil rights movement? (Three who gave their lives: Remembering the martyrs of Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964)

Perhaps Mrs. Bush could begin with “A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present,” by Howard Zinn:

Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn–a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years–explains, “My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)–that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.”

… narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians’ struggle against Europeans, blacks’ struggle against racism, women’s struggle against patriarchy, and workers’ struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clinton’s pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions’ slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. …

(Amazon)

In the Kos cross-post, I quoted from Welshman’s story below.