Reviews for Cartoon History of the American Revolution

The average rating for Cartoon History of the American Revolution based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-30 00:00:00 Steven Ritter Peculiar Evil was Not a "Positive Good" This seminal book, published in 1960, began a decade haunted by arguably the most heinous and evil acts committed by private individuals (singularly and collectively) in the name of hatred borne of an insidious ignorance. Dr. Woodward chronicles this malevolence as it mushroomed in the South up to 1960 and considers the tragic ironies. He vehemently argued that Southerners (particularly the hypocritical "intellectual" South) must face the experiences of evil and tragedy that are part of the Southern heritage in order to move on. A couple of striking passages come to mind as particularly memorable: "... the Southern heritage is distinctive. For Southern history, unlike American, includes large components of frustration, failure and defeat. It includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." "Much of the South's intellectual energy went into a desperate effort to convince the world that its peculiar evil was actually a 'positive good,' but it failed even to convince itself." Included in the current version (which Dr. Woodward updated after 1960) are excellent chapters entitled, "The Burden of William Faulkner" and "The Burden of Robert Penn Warren." I think this is a must for anyone with an interest in the real history of the American South, stripped of "traditions" and "lost causes."

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-16 00:00:00 ron delany The two key essays in this collection are the ones around which the book was built: "The Search for Southern Identity" (originally published in 1958) and "The Irony of Southern History" (1953). In "The Search for Southern Identity," Woodward described a conviction among American southerners that their sectional identity was slipping away from them as the South developed and urbanized, and, in the 1950s, as the Jim Crow edifice began to totter. Woodward suggested that there actually was a distinctive and vital southern culture worth saving; it was a form of dissent from relentless American nationalism, materialism, and conformism. The South, unlike most of the country, was in a good position to question the myth of America's limitless abundance and inevitable success; it had known real poverty -- and the fact that defeat can be real and devastating -- for generations. The South had also, thanks to slavery, known what it meant to have a collective "tortured conscience," which was something that might occasionally do the rest of the country good. Thus, southern identity was something very valuable to conserve. The great danger for the modernizing South, however, was that it would cling to racism as its defining characteristic, as the Old South had clung to slavery. This would be a second great southern tragedy. In "The Irony of Southern History," Woodward also addressed the question of what the South could offer the rest of the country during the 1950s. Borrowing the concept of historical irony from Reinhold Niebuhr, Woodward argued that the South, due to its "eccentricity" within the United States, was in a good position to show the rest of the country that America was eccentric vis-à-vis the rest of the world. As Niebuhr wrote, most Americans enjoyed unhealthy "illusions of innocence and virtue" that belied the nation's awesome postwar power. While Americans pretended to be uniquely unspotted by the corruptions of the world, their idealism in the nuclear age actually forced them into the position of potential global executioner. The South, of course, participated in this illusion and irony; but unlike the rest of the country, it had already seen vividly that claims of noble character sometimes conceal -- and even cause -- moral depravity, and that a people zealous for its beautiful traditions can thereby become fanatical in defense of its vices. The South, in other words, was a place where "history" had happened -- where there were limits to optimism about human goodness. Surely this knowledge could be useful to a victorious and idealistic American people who had never (yet) known the chastening of history.