Word: prescott
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...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 similar to John Winthrop's famous Journal. Samuel's descendants apparently managed to maintain a unique historical proximity to many of the most prominent figures in American politicla history, from William Penn to FDR. Even more surprisingly, they left behind an invaluable set of documents to tell the tale...
...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...