There are two common laments that average folks have about history: (1) They’re trying to rewrite it, and (2) they never taught me that in class.

While there are multiple reasons for both statements, one that they have in common is the limited amount of time that can be devoted to history in high school or college survey courses. If an educator only touches upon the basics of the American colonial period and then tries to get within the life experiences of his students, he faces the daunting task of cover at least 250 years worth of information in nine months or less. Thus there’s little time for that piece of the past between Columbus and the Declaration, an comparable amount of time.

It’s not uncommon, then, for most Americans to know little of the colonial era other than some thin understanding of the Pilgrims. Thus a nasty massacre of French Huguenots in Florida by the Spanish a half century earlier never gets mentioned. The story of how a Massachusetts woman carrying a hatchet — no, not Carrie Nation — and a handful of scalps became a hero is not one that gets celebrated at Thanksgiving. And perhaps as relevant to American history as the turkey were Queen Isabella’s pigs.

It’s not that you were absent the day these things were covered in class. Hardly anyone else heard of them either. Fortunately, Kenneth C. Davis, author of the bestselling “Don’t Know Much About History,” did stumble across these stories and ably wrote recorded them in his “America’s Hidden History, Untold Tales Of The First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, And Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.” Davis continues on this theme, telling of George Washington’s culpability in a massacre that happened years before the American Revolution, how an egg-toss and a founding father in a toga figured into events in revolutionary Boston and some details about a group of little-known farmers who almost derailed the American experiment before the Constitution was even written.

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 ”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby

2008, Pantheon, $26

Hardback, 356 pages

My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.

I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.

I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”

“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”

I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.

A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.

So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”

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With the bestsellers “1776” and “John Adams,” David McCullough, in some ways, reinvented the history book.
No longer solely the providence of stuffy academics, the history book, in McCullough’s hands, wove an artful tale that enthralled like a work of fiction and educated like a work of history, all with an elegant and graceful prose.
For better or worse, that will be how most subsequent works of history that reach for a general audience will be measured.
With that in mind, it’s safe to say that “Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence,” John Ferling’s epic retelling of the American Revolution, won’t be confused with a McCullough work.
That shouldn’t condemn Ferling’s book, though. Few can tell history the way McCullough does, and that doesn’t mean we should discard anything that fails to reach those heights.
Ferling’s book does an admirable job of condensing the Revolution — from its beginnings at Lexington and Concord to its conclusion with the Treaty of Paris — into a largely readable account.
And for those of you who think you have a decent understanding of the Revolution, you might rethink that after reading this book. At nearly 600 pages, it’s a lengthy endeavor, but ultimately a satisfying one as Ferling recreates, in largely readable and accessible prose, just how unlikely a success the Revolution truly was.
Sure, the book has some faults. For one, it could’ve been an easier read if Ferling took the war on a year-by-year basis, instead of a more geographic one. At times, it’s difficult to make sense of what’s going on when the book dips backward in time.
A “Who’s Who” roster at the beginning would’ve been a nice touch, too, because there are so many generals and soldiers on both sides that it’s often difficult to remember 300 pages in who was doing what.
But those are minor quibbles. For a mostly easy-to-follow account of the remarkable founding of this country, and just how surprising it was that those patriots managed to pull it off, spend some time with Ferling’s book. It’ll serve as a nice bookend to the early stages of the Revolution as told in McCullough’s “1776.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “There is properly no history; only biography.” Perhaps the inverse is true, however, in the case of Zachary Taylor — a soldier who lived through fascinating moments in early nineteenth century history only to expire before finishing the final, and potentially most important, chapter of his life.

“Old Rough and Ready,” as he was known for his military exploits, served less than a year and a half as president before green apples and cherries chased with milk on a July day in 1850 gave him a fatal stomach ailment. But Taylor had lived a full life, if not much of it took place in the White House. It’s hard to imagine anyone more appropriate to be called upon to write a brief biography of this general-turned-president than John S.D. Eisenhower, a former general himself and the son of a famed general who followed Taylor’s path to the White House. Too, Eisenhower’s books on Gen. Winfield Scott and the Mexican War prove his ample knowledge of the era.

Simply entitled Zachary Taylor, Eisenhower’s biography is concise at less than 200 pages, yet informative. It follows Taylor’s military career through not just the Mexican War fame that made him president, but his earlier years in the War of 1812, the Blackhawk and Seminole wars and, more generally, his life as a soldier largely on the antebellum frontier.

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 The following is a transcript of a wide-ranging interview I conducted Wednesday with Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons instructor and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.His most recent book is “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement,” (2007, Nation Books), a copy of which sat on the table at Quetzal as we talked. Also present were Jacob Flowers, executive director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, George Grider, the center’s board chairman, and Dr. Jose Davila, a Christian Brothers University mechanical engineering associate professor who also happens to sit on the center’s board.Ritter was in town to speak at CBU on Thursday on the topic, “U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Iraq Occupation and Target Iran.”Q: How did you get into this position of being a person who’s anti-war, being an officer in the Marine Corps, going from that to being antiwar? It seems to me that there would be some epiphany involved, and I wanted to see what that would be for you.