So the new press is telling me the old press exaggerated about a George?
R
Yes. Purely unbiased history is never going to happen as any historiographer can tell you. It swings like a pendulum of constant over-correction. This is why people need to be taught to research on their own, understand footnotes, and what constitutes primary source material.
Americans have fallen into one of two traps recently. Before historical scholarship was taken as seriously as it is now, people fell into the other.
When Jefferson penned the words "all men are created equal", he wasn't making a statement of fact, rather he was setting a goal in mind. Now one trap in which we as a society can fall, is to assume that because our forefathers failed to achieve all of their goals within their lifetimes, they they are somehow complete failures, flawed to the point of disregard for what they did achieve; we thow out the proverbial baby with the bath water. The second trap is to glorify them almost to the point of deification simply because they did achieve some great things, regardless of the mistakes they made along the way. Regardless of what they did achieve, babies sometimes do need baths.
After centuries of a geocentric model of the universe built on the presuppositions of Ptolemy, Galileo and others, it took Copernicus' heliocentric model to erase complicated and unnecessary equations and theories to explain the mars retrograde. In the same way, even after all that, Sir Isaac Newton was asked how he was able to articulate the principle of gravity millennia after all of humanity subjected to it. He exclaimed that if he could see farther than those in the past it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. If the American founders were able to form a more perfect union, the most free and functional republic the world had ever seen, after being only the first to do so after casting off the shackles of tyranny and taking up for themselves the reigns of self governance, it was because they too stood upon the shoulders of giants; Cicero, Aristotle, Montesque, Hume, Locke, and Smith. Now here we are with our ability to see further than the founders, only because we too are standing on giants' shoulders.
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