E-Book Overview
Who is to say what is real history and what is false, faked, or otherwise bogus? The historian Carl Becker once famously wrote of "everyman [as] his own historian," suggesting that we all individually choose what to assign value to in the episodic past and we construct a usable history to satisfy ourselves. Mostly that is fine, but sometimes it takes strange turns. This book, by one of my graduate student colleagues of many years ago, explores how bizarre some of this construction of the past may become. It is an outstanding analysis of the strange and weird in history. "Invented Knowledge" is mostly about conspiracy theories and concepts of supposedly "repressed" truths in human history. Fritze begins with a lengthy discussion of the possibility of a lost continent of Atlantis. It is certainly one of the most persistent of beliefs held by people of all times and places despite the lack of hard evidence supporting its existence. Fritze appropriately calls it the "mother of pseudohistory." Chapters follow on myths surrounding the discovery and settlement of ancient America. My personal favorite is the so-called Welsh Indians, a group supposedly led to America by Prince Madoc in the twelfth century which formed its own tribe. Many expeditions sought to find this group, and Lewis and Clark and others believed that Mandan tribe in the upper Midwest were the descendents of these pioneers. Of course, different populations reached America in different ways and there is much speculation and only modest hard evidence. Accordingly, it is easy for pseudohistory to emerge when evidence is minimal and conflicting. Ron Fritze also expends considerable effort, two full chapters, discussing the construction of racist cosmogonies. His explanation of the rise of racist perspectives among both white and black separatists is illuminating and frightening. Those chapters make up the heart of the book and offer a fascinating analys