Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History
by Eric Foner
(IB Tauris, £10.99)

ERIC FONER comes from a renowned dynasty of radical historians.

His father was a pioneer in establishing black studies in the US and his uncle, also a member of the Communist Party, won recognition for his studies of the labour movement.

Foner himself is an award-winning revisionist historian and Pulitzer Prize-winner and in this selection of essays he wrote from 1977 to the present day for The Nation magazine he questions the traditional whitewashing of history.

It begins with a reappraisal of the lives and contribution made by the judicially murdered Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 and concludes with his essay, written this year, Teaching American Radicalism in the Age of Obama.

He encourages the reader to look at US history with different eyes and learn from labour and anti-slavery struggles, the black liberation movement and the battle for women’s rights.

He demolishes the simplistic and mythical national narrative of pioneering colonialists, indomitable cowboys conquering the so-called Wild West, patriotic white male heroes and the idea of progress being achieved by climbing a ladder, step-by-step, to a star-spangled heaven.

In doing so, Foner demonstrates how progress has come about as a result of bitter struggle and has not been handed down by beneficent legislators or philanthropists.

He interrogates that past and questions the iconic imagery and myths that have become almost holy writ.

One of the first to describe the eradication of native Americans as “our own home-grown Holocaust,” he rails against the prevailing amnesia on this issue.

While he is a passionate advocate of equal rights, he sees integration as the only way forward and is critical of certain aspects of the Black Power movement, which he sees as divisive.

Foner sees his role as a historian to provide modern-day social activists with a “usable past” — not propaganda, but giving them access to, and an understanding of, their own history.

He argues that the right has always effectively misused history for its own purpose, just as Trump is doing today. It’s “as if America was created perfect and has just been getting better ever since,” he says.

Foner does not see Trump as an aberration in US history, like so many, but as “a logical extension of the way the Republican Party has been operating since Goldwater.”

While these essays are primarily addressed to his compatriots, his approach, wisdom and insights are instructive and illuminating for all of us.

A book well worth reading.

John Green

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