Book Reviewed by Carol Van Strum A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell. Free Press, 2010. Hardcover, $27.00.
I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
— Mark Twain, Huck Finn, 1884
“In Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two Columbus sailed the ocean blue to bring Puritans to America for turkey and pumpkin pie with Red Indians. Then they threw away their tea and had a war and George Washington got to be the first president.”
Thus does an average American schoolchild wrap up the first 180 years of U.S. history. On schoolroom walls, bonnet-clad pioneer women and handsome white settlers in coonskin caps symbolize the origins and values of a nation.
A very different portrait of Early Americana lurks in old records and accounts somehow overlooked in our official version of ourselves. “On nearly every block in every eighteenth-century American city, there was a public place where one could drink, sing, dance, have sex, argue politics, gamble, play games, or generally carouse with men, women, children, whites, blacks, Indians, the rich, the poor, and the middling,” writes Thaddeus Russell in A Renegade History of the United States.
Few if any whorehouses or taverns adorn the walls of our schoolrooms. Maybe we need to redecorate those walls. Kids might actually pay attention to history if they knew that at the time of the American Revolution: