Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Artifacts: Our Great Heritage Index




The Bicentennial, America’s 200-th birthday in 1976, was a big deal at the time.  It was ubiquitously merchandised and there was some national pride in our representative democracy lasting this long.  1976 was honestly very poor timing for such a celebration.  The country was about to enter a recession, manned spaceflight was in a lull, there was a recent bad end to a long war, a president had just resigned in scandal, and the Soviet Union and communism were an increasing existential menace.  On the other hand, perhaps that made it the perfect time to celebrate the accomplishments of America.     

This series of books, Our Great Heritage . . . From the Beginning, was a fairly literate part of that nationalistic profiteering.  These books were marketed to parents for their kids, but they were written at about an adult level.  The articles would take a specific event or topic and generally give a two-page overview of the subject.  They’d be fairly useful for helping to write history papers or for history-minded kids (like me). 

They were sold at the supermarket, probably released one volume a month.  (My family also acquired a set of encyclopedias this way.)  They’re pretty high-quality oversized hardbacks of 128 pages each.  I don’t know how much they cost, but they couldn’t have been too much given my parents’ thrifty spending habits.  Regrettably, mom is no longer around to ask.  This is how I ended up with the books in my possession.  After her death, dad was going to trade them off if I didn’t take them.      

The wave of happy nostalgia I had looking back through the books was somewhat ruined when I actually read the text.  These books are very much a product of their time.  Coming right after Watergate and Vietnam, the tone, especially in the later volumes, seriously questions America’s actions.  The articles have a fairly persuasive liberal slant, but only if you’re still living in the 70’s.  Living with effect of this kind of thinking for a couple of generations, it’s going to impress someone with it unless they have no historical perspective or are someone tone deaf to changing times.       

In the forward, the editors even felt compelled to justify producing a new American history series.  Their reasoning was sound in defending their decision.  History is not immutable, but always changing.  There are new discoveries and a continual reinterpretation of the past based on current events.  They also made no apologies for their editorial decisions on what subjects they covered.  They hit the highlights of historical events and also focused on topics with modern relevance (such as women’s rights and black civil rights).  I found that a lot the criticisms and pressing issues for the country from the past are still relevant today.  Some things never change.

I’d actually forgotten the first article of the series.  It featured a long piece on the Vikings being the first Europeans to discover the New World.  However, later in the series, they glossed over the entire Space Race in two pages (not to mention the Korean and Vietnam wars).  If you look at the brochure above, it shows an article about the Moon Landing, but that article isn't actually in the books.  Even with the bias of the commentary, these books would be not be considered PC today by the “woke” crowd, as there are highly complementary articles about Southern Civil War Generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. 

The most interesting item I found was about a US invasion of Russia.  I’d read a comic book story alluding to this once, but didn’t really know the details.  During WWI, the czar in Russia was toppled by Bolshevik communists.  (I know it’s more complicated than that.)  The new Soviet government immediately signed a peace treaty with the Germans whom they’d been fighting.  A large number of Czech troops got caught on the wrong side of the lines because of that change in alliances.  American, British, French, and Japanese troops participated in their evacuation along with securing a large stockpile of munitions. 

One editorial decision I definitely agreed with was the commissioning of original art for the series instead of using stock photos and paintings.  While I’ve decided I’m not keeping the books (which I have no room for anyway), I did want to preserve some the artwork, which was my favorite part.  I thought they’d also make good blog material.  I’m going to avoid doing commentary on the pictures and the events they depict and let them speak for themselves.  I apologize for the quality of the scans, but it’s no worse than the books splitting most of the best pictures down the middle with the binding.  If you’re wondering, my favorite image is the first book’s cover, The Puritans.

How important is history?  I was showing a younger co-worker some pictures from these books and explaining some of the events with them.  I mentioned of the War of 1812.  He’d never heard of it.  He didn’t know the story behind The Star Spangled Banner (the national anthem).  When I told him that British troops had captured Washington DC and burned down the city and the White House (technically not called that at the time) during the war, he completely freaked out.  (British troops did post videos of the burning of Washington on Tik Tok, but showing arson violated the TOS and their accounts were suspended.)  What do they teach kids in school today?  


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