Great American Statesmen and Heroes [Paperback]

Catherine Millard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1995

Current hitory books have purposely removed any mention of the Christian character traits and godliness of America's greatest founding fathers, leaders, statesmen, inventors and heroes. Make sure you know the truth!

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Horizon Books Publishers (July 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0889651205
• ISBN-13: 978-0889651203
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent anti-dote to liberal revisionism, November 7, 1999

By 

Dan ([e-mail]) (Bremerton, Washington, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great American Statesmen and Heroes (Paperback)

The best part of this book is its documented proof of Captain John Smith's Christianity and love for the Indians. It seems to be a countering view to Peter Marshall's criticism of the action of the JamesTown Settlers.

Also, its Chapter on Christopher Columbus is excellent. It is a perfect countering view to Peter Marshall's description of Columbus being money grabbing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Title says it all., October 19, 2011

By 

pwindsor - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Great American Statesmen and Heroes (Paperback)

I love this book. It is a short biography of the heroes who founded our country, their faith in God and His values. Their sacrifices and determination to build a country on freedom. This book was used but in great like new condition. I purchased it for a friend who loves history. I think I need to order another one.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars American Heroes as Tribal Religious Saints, October 31, 2009

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great American Statesmen and Heroes (Paperback)

This is the standard fare of the "Euro-Christian centered" version of American history as it is seen and told through narratives of the exploits of its 39 top white male heroes. The canvas upon which the exploits of these heroes is painted is an avowedly "white Christian background," later to become, over the better part of a millennium, and through global cultural osmosis, the universal background for all humanity.

These narratives are interesting as much for what they embellish and include as standardized American history, as for what they exclude and deny. Yet, this is the fare that was "force fed" to my generation as a youngster. And here, reviewing all this in retrospect, I do not believe the phrase "force fed" is too strong a characterization. For with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, and a somewhat less provincial training in history in the intervening years, it is much easier to see the outlines of the template of propaganda that was then drilled into our heads. And of course, this was done with no chance of hearing an alternative point of view of history.

I am embarrassed to now admit that when Black Studies and Gender studies were first introduced in the early 1970s when I was then a young University Assistant Professor, I too thought "this was not what a good university education should be about." However, this volume clearly points out how the misguided and flawed pedagogy that is still being used to convey both Christian and Eurocentric political and religious content and orthodoxy even today, came about. Its template is unsubtle and direct. It is to first establish the Christian bona fides of the heroes (even where none exists, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson, who was a "Deist" rather than a Christian) and then use scriptures and prayers to attest to divine Christian intervention in all of their exploits.

And while it is undeniable that there is some truth embedded in the facts surrounding the context of much of these testaments, there is so much conscious and heavy-handed abstraction of them that one could not possibly expect even mature minds -- not to mention untutored young minds -- to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. Discounting for the fact that a great deal of history is purposeful mythology, breast-beating patriotism and social imagery for conscious political purposes and effect, it is still true that for a country claiming democratic freedoms and openness as the very basis of its foundation, there should be definite redlines that separate us from the totalitarian societies we have long lambasted for manufacturing their own "propagandistic version of history." Yet, from these narratives, there do not appear to be any such clear redlines: American Christian propaganda, frontier mythology and selective facts are all merged into one easy to swallow soothing but flawed smorgasbord.

Here for instance there are no hints that a non-white or a non-Christian world even exists. Even though at the time of Christopher Columbus' four trips to the "New World," to use but one glaring example among many in the book, the King and Queen of Spain (who underwrote Columbus' trips) were at that very time ejecting the Jews as well as the Arabs, from the European continent. How could historians subtract out such monumental facts that co-existed with Columbus's trips? Especially when Christ himself, as were all of his Disciples, was a Jew?

Such distortions have a lifetime of consequences on those who are force fed this unchallenged and very much distorted version of American history. For instance, throughout my time as a Black Southern Christian, little was known about Jews other than that they killed Christ (and owned most of the Jewelry and clothing stores on main street in my small home town). For many years, I assumed that Jesus and his disciples were normal European white men? Although Jews were mentioned in church, it was as if they were only foils for the real humans, the Romans -- who even though they came off as biblical villains they were also viewed as the only "real" humans in the bible. The word "Jew" was carefully conflated and orchestrated through a minefield of nonsense so that the "correct wrong" interpretation about them was always maintained.

Moreover, there, as is true elsewhere in these narratives, Native Americans, who even though it was their land that was being invaded, were seen only as foils for the invading British colonial subjects. Native American subjectivity, and the reality of their well-defined and highly evolved social and political institutions are not only ignored, but also consciously and systematically "written out" of this version of American history. Beyond being savages who needed to be civilized (meaning Christianized), their contributions to history and for being stewards of the continent for ten thousand years is not even alluded to. The running subtext, without even saying so explicitly, is that there is nothing about Indian culture that is worth mentioning in American history. Yet, rather paradoxically it was Native American democracy and not that of the British colonials that admitted women as equals, did not believe in or use slaves (that is not until European Settlers showed them how), and was much more highly evolved in every respect than the hypocritical version that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in the 1830s. Rather than focus on the very evolved form of democracy that could have informed that of the Settlers, these biographical tracts, as do others, focus on the blood sacrifice of young virgins, and on cannibalism, etc. as what Native American culture was really all about.

The saddest part of this rendition of "history as American propaganda" is not the distorted picture that it leaves in its wake, but that these men, who deserve a fair historical hearing, instead of being the interesting men they really were, (with warts, blemishes, moral challenges and all), are here portrayed as little more than one-dimensional religious cutouts, pseudo-tribal saints who just happen to go on and found an "all white" nation that believed in "white only" freedoms: A nation, which even today is still struggling with the legacy of the hypocrisy of histories like this one. Two stars.