America: The Story of Us

I’m a sucker for a good history project. And the oddity of seeing history on The History Channel stopped me in my tracks – much like the odd music video on MTV. It is apparently a 6 episode mini-series. After episode 1 of America: the Story of Us, the jury is still out for me. Maybe it’s inevitable for a broad survey of history for the last 224 years, but there were a lot of trite cliches in there. Seems like there were two or three moments in the first episode “that would change the course of history forever.” And there were vast amounts of stuff they glossed over or skipped entirely.

But, again, I like history. Near as I can figure from episode 1 of the mini-series, a bunch of incompetent boobs landed in Jamestown and would have died off completely but for the self-reliant determination of John Rolfe and his tobacco seeds. Meanwhile, up north, a band of religious activists came in on the Mayflower and were starving and would have died off completely if the local, smallpox decimated natives hadn’t shown them how to bury fish in the sand to grow crops. Then nothing happened for the next 150 years. Then the British seized some of John Hancock’s smuggled contraband. That made the folks in Boston restless, so the British shot a couple, including Crispus Attucks. Paul Revere sketched the scene and the rest of the colonies rose up in rebellion despite the fact that the British repealed most of the taxes except the one on tea.

The British came in to put down the rebellion and captured New York in the biggest attack on New York “until 9/11” (wtf? 9/11 was awful, but it was a pinprick compared to armed invasion by a British armada). George Washington and his ragtag band of scrappy soldiers equipped with little more than frontier rifles, a “can do” attitude, and a belly full of freedom put down the world’s greatest military power. (Now what will really interest me is to see how they treat Shay’s Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion and explain why their love of freedom and hatred of taxes weren’t enough to withstand Washington and his troops after they had become The Establishment.)

After assassinating a few British officers, withstanding the privations of Valley Forge, and training under a gay Prussian military officer, the Americans took the last two redoubts at Yorktown and the British surrendered. Oh yeah, and the French helped some too.

At the end of the day, I guess my mixed feelings have to do with my ambivalence about American history generally. On the one hand, I value the American mythology – where our Founders were nothing but good and noble and the righteous Americans were fighting the evil British. Myths bind us together as a nation and help us see ourselves as Americans. I think this sense of being part of a common group is essential to a peaceful society. Members of a common group tend to work out their differences without violence.

On the other hand, I appreciate that history is messy and full of details that generally prevent sweeping generalizations about good and evil. At best, if you’re lucky, you can often come up with reasonably coherent narratives about “us” and “them.” And with the American Revolution, the “us” and “them,” is a whole lot messier than the mini-series lets on. Prior to the Revolution, after all, the colonists were British. Many were reluctant to take up arms against what they regarded as countrymen and remained loyal to the British crown.

Regardless, however, if this mini-series gives more people a nodding acquaintance with the basic facts of American history, I suppose I should put it in the “win” column.