Myth-Understood America The Most Entrenched Myths about Crucial Topics of U.S. History

It can be astonishing to step back and notice just how much of what Americans think they know about their history turns out not to be true. Columbus’s contemporaries didn’t disagree with him about whether the earth is round, just about how wide it is. And had he realized that he was wrong and they were right, he might never have sailed west into the Atlantic. Puritans were not puritan in the modern sense; by the time of the American Revolution, a third of New England couples were pregnant on their wedding day. The Continental Congress intended the Declaration of Independence as an ordinance of secession; it would take decades of activism on the part of anti-slavery and pro-women’s rights activists to transform the Declaration into the freedom document we revere today. Of course, one person’s myth is another person’s established fact, so this course will be as much a discussion as it is an illustrated lecture. We will not only debate individual myths but discuss the functions myths serve in society and how America’s mythology compares to its counterparts overseas.