Word: prescott
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 capture. Prescott (alias Fried), who has previously revealed a similar book on the Cold War, puts it this...
...being the province this time of my (or my master's) invention. Maybe so, but this, as I have been at some pains to show, is a pedestrian and unimaginative way of approaching the truth. A last word of reassurance then (if it is still needed): I exist! The Prescott family existed! These chronicles exist...
...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 even FDR's second New Deal unabashedly capitalistic, to reactionaries like Timothy Prescott, Tory poet. Still, it isn't hard to tell where Fried's own sympathies lie; in Julian's words, "Mine was a family of antinomians, dissenters, gadflies and nay-sayers." Most of the Prescotts, at least the most articulate...
...message is essentially no more than a liberal critique of American society; pointing to the vast economic gulf between rich and poor, he advocates the transformation of our social and economic structure as a prerequisite to the establishment of a truly representative government. The senators cry revolution, yet Prescott's revolution is not "the violent over-throw of the government" but rather...
...even Fried's own history seems to substantiate Prescott's claim that contemporary America is a fallen world, at odds with its ideal past. A large part of the book's bite comes, in fact, from a half-humorous debunking of out historical myths: Emerson got most of his ideas from his Unitarian cohorts, Fried smirkingly insinuates, and Benjamin ("Early to bed, early to rise") Franklin never rose until noon. More substantively, it's hard to detect any real difference between, for example, the imperialism for which Julian chides the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Stuart Rantoul Prescott's glorious...