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also with a failure to provide a narrative synthesis, to tell a big story instead of many little ones. Those criticisms were warranted. They were also criticisms academic historians had made of themselves. Scholars criticize and argue—and must, and can—because scholars share a common set of ideas about how to argue, and what counts as evidence. But the far right’s American history—its antihistory—existed outside of argument and had no interest in evidence. It was much a fiction as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously antipluralist. 60 It erased slavery from American history and compressed a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if ideas worked out, over decades of debate and fierce disagreement, were held by everyone, from the start. “Who’s yourfavorite Founder?” Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.” 61
    There was, though, something heartbreaking in all this. Behind the Tea Party’s Revolution lay nostalgia for an imagined time—the 1950s, maybe, or the 1940s—less riven by strife, less troubled by conflict, less riddled with ambiguity, less divided by race. In that nostalgia was the remembrance of childhood, a yearning for a common past, bulwark against a divided present, comfort against an uncertain future. “History is not a dry academic subject for us,” as Hess put it. “It is our heritage.” 62

EPILOGUE
Revering America
    The waves that rocked them on the deep
To them their secret told.
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Boston,” 1873
    On Sunday, April 18, 2010, three days after the Tea Party Express left Boston, George Pataki rode into town. Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, was thinking about running for president; he was in need of a Founding Father. In Boston’s North End, he positioned himself in front of an equestrian statue of Paul Revere. He was there to launch “Revere America,” a nonprofit “dedicated to advancing common sense public policies rooted in our traditions of freedom and free markets that will once again make America secure and prosperous for generations to come.” Its goal was “to harness and amplify the voices of the American people to give them a greater say in fighting back against the threats to freedom posed by Washington liberals.” At RevereAmerica.org, you could sign a petition “to repeal and replace Obamacare” by clicking on an icon of a quill and inkwell on a piece of parchment. You could also watch a video of Pataki giving his speech to his staffers, a few passersby, and a handful of supporters. Austin Hess was in it. He was wearing his tricornered hat. He was wearing his “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. He was carrying a sign: “Remember in November.”
    “We’re standing near where Paul Revere, on this day, two hundred and thirty-five years ago, began a ride,” Pataki said. “He was looking to tell patriotic Americans, ‘Our freedom was in danger.’ We’re here today to tell the people of America that once again our freedom is in danger.”

    I wasn’t there, but I’d been there before, often; it’s a place I like to go. Standing there, in front of that statue, Pataki happened to be standing where Jane Mecom’s house once stood: in the 1930s, it was demolished to make room for that memorial to Paul Revere. 1
    The motto of Revere America was “Respecting Our History. Protecting Our Future.” The Founding Fathers George Pataki wanted Americans to worship fought a Revolution, he believed, for the sake of free markets. That’s not what the Revolution meant to Jane Mecom. In the summer of 1786, when Mecom was living in that house that would one day be demolished to make room for a statue of Paul Revere, she wrote a letter telling her brother that, in Boston, the Fourth of July—the nation’s tenth birthday—was overshadowed by yet another wonderful celebration: the opening of a bridge to Cambridge. She loved