What Happened Was...

History Against the Grain

This week the HAG news team covers the latest staged performance of the long-running tragicomedy known as U.S. History. We watch as historical veracity gets bum-rushed by the flag waving drugstore cowboys of the Arizona legislature. These dude ranch dudes down in the Valley of the Sun are threatening a $5,000 fine for any public school teacher willing to teach the truth about the bloody and racist past of American history. “Out damned spot! Out, I say!” cry the history sanitizers. Sorry dudes, but you gotta know, that whether or not you can keep it out of the official dude ranch narrative, it seems that blood just does not want to wash away. And that’s the thing about sanitizing historical narratives, they’re always full of Freudian slips and just badly bandaged enough to keep the inconvenient truths alive and out of the censors’ reach. Once again, Josh draws back the big curtain to expose history’s hustlers, showing how the apologists of Spanish Empire invented a new genre of historical narrative that set the stage for today’s national histories. It all sounds pretty familiar as conquest gets rebranded as discovery, plunderers are recast as heroes, and from New Spain to New Orleans, the chorus of power never tires of singing how god is on their side.