On Students On the Tea Party

What a powerful assignment!  I am seeing our thought exercises at the beginning of the year paying off.  These constant discussions about the nature of history, and the creation of historiography, the importance of multiple perspectives and the question of how certain our knowledge of the past can be...

I asked the students to read Jill Lepore's New Yorker essay on the uses to which the Boston Tea Party (and by extension, the American Revolution) has been put in service to modern concerns, and asked the kids to write their own historical thought essay.  The earlier example I posted I just thought was funny, but I wasn't prepared for the depth of thought some of these students put into their work--and their anger at purposeful distortion.  I am posting some of the more interesting  paragraphs in the next series of posts:

"We as Americans need to stop using our past as an excuse for the things that we’re doing today, or as propaganda. It only highlights that we don’t know our own history at all. The mere fact that a gay rights movement, an anti-Nixon movements, and an anti-taxation movements all used the Tea Party to compare themselves should show us that it’s all complete speculation – and we should just let it be. We need to stop looking back at the past to what I assume most people see as “good old-fashioned America” and start looking towards the future, seeing how we can change what we do now in a more radical way as opposed to just following what those before us did. 

"After all, they got us to where we are today, and where we are today is not such a good situation. People think reverting back to how things were in the past is a way to restore the nation. Maybe instead, we should try something new. That’s what people were looking for in Obama, but now the Tea Partiers are using each of his mistakes to justify their ideas of returning to the old. And when they don’t do that, they try to make their ideas look new. Did anyone read the new Republican Pledge? It’s essentially everything that they’ve already proposed and said they’d do before – reduce spending, make the tax cuts permanent, etc, etc.

"I think people assume that the America of old was perfect. They speak about going back to it – back to the days when patriotism was everything, when we fought for our country, our freedom. However, they don’t look at the whole picture. The people in the Revolution didn’t fight for America. They fought to self-govern and stop the king mucking around in their financial affairs. They had slaves, and they killed Indians. This selective blindness is something that we look down on other countries like Japan and China for doing. It’s also a big reason why America is one of the lesser liked countries of this world."