Word: friedli
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The Prescott Chromicles purports to be a collection of first-person source material--journals, letters, literary sketches, etc.--culled from the archives of one very prominent American family. According to Fried, the Prescotts go way back--all the way to pious Samuel Prescott, who penned a Book of Confessions startlingly...
Of course, the documents are fake, the inspired creations of Fried's imagination. But, as Fried (under the pseudonym Julian K. Prescott, the latest member of the line) argues in his preface, they tell the sort of truth most histories, based as they are on inadequate evidence, can never quite...
As an historian, Fried is a mild revisionist who sees American history as a process of declension from the egalitarian ardor that sparked the American revolution. Fried's characters, in whose mouths versimilitude passes for verity, run the gamut from out-and-out radicals like Anthony Flagg Prescott, hwo finds...
The tip-off to Fried's perspective--and the book's climax--comes in the cpilogue, a transcript of Julian's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The vocal indignation of the committee notwithstanding, Julian's message is essentially no more than a liberal critique of American society; pointing...
His is in fact a backward-looking revolution, which envisions a return to a mythical historical past in which Horatio Alger individualism was unhampered by monopoly power. Such a vision, reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, presupposes a peculiarly slanted view of American history--one which Julian loses no...