For those who love to read and love learning about our nations history, this is another EXCELLENT book. It’s actually the precursor to HCR’s newest book “Democracy Awakening” I read ”How The South Won The Civil War” several months ago and this book inspired me to get Heather’s newest book. Both are phenomenal and I guarantee you that you’ll learn things about our history that you never knew before!
This is the review by Book EM Dano:
“How The South Won The Civil War” which starts with; “The book that teaches that the most obscure jokes in "Blazing Saddles" were based on real history”. Since the review is somewhat long, I’ll post it in two parts.
"Blazing Saddles" was a monumental comedy that gave one shin kick after another to the supposedly separate subjects of anti-black bigotry and the Western cowboy mythology. Besides the 8th grade humor moments ("More beans, Mr. Taggert?") there were just some jokes and references that seemed completely put together with Super Glue (even though I'm pretty sure the latter hadn't been invented yet). When Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid first face off against Hedy ("That's Hedley!") Lamarr's bad guys, Slim Pickens (in one of his 3 epic movie roles) goes into a complaint about how the cowboys had taken the "good time and effort" to shoot all the native Americans (not the term he used) and here the governor had "appointed a sheriff darker than any of them." And of course, there's the line I can't repeat, that ends with "but we don't want the Irish!" Most of us, even those of us who studied some history, thought that these were artificial constructs Mel Brooks had put together to take down all sorts of bigotry. Certainly, it did that, while spoofing Marlene Dietrich (epic performance by Madeline Kahn).
What happens when you read a book by a real historian (Heather Cox Richardson) and find out that, in fact, racism against African Americans and Native Americans and Asian Americans (mostly Chinese immigrants at that time) and Latins (mostly Mexican Americans at that time) and the Irish were not separate threads, but a continuation of the Antebellum South into the West? What happens when you realize that the few women in the movie parody the roles written into the mythology (either the upright wives, mothers, and very loud school teachers or the dance hall girls/prostitutes)? There's this moment of, "Wait! That stuff was real?" Cont...