Word: muzzey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact that the immigrants stirred up antiforeign prejudices, by 1907 the attempt to assimilate them produced the democratic melting pot theory, though years passed before textbooks preached it. National self-confidence, meanwhile, was being further boosted by America's growing role on the global scene. David Saville Muzzey's An American History, the most successful U.S. history text ever, appeared...
...Muzzey imparted a courtly patrician New England tone in his history. He looked fondly toward Europe, disliked Reconstruction and was intensely patriotic about America's virtue and increasing power. He also wrote well, partly because he saw history as the work of great men whose stories made for a dramatic narrative. His book remained a standard text for more than 60 years...
Reconstruction has been completely reinterpreted. Where Muzzey and many others castigated the "scalawags" and "carpetbaggers," a new edition of a bestselling history, the Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti Rise of the American Nation, speaks primly of "Radical Republicans" who were "influenced by a sincere feeling of obligation to the freed slaves." A few post-Viet Nam texts note the use of torture by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines in 1899, a subject never mentioned before...
FitzGerald disapproves of Muzzey's historical viewpoint but likes his writing...
Without a return to some consensus in society at large, no future textbook historian will ever again have Muzzey's authority or his winning "tone of self-assurance, his assumption of his own legitimacy in the American tradition...