Michael Parenti: History as Mystery

0-87286-357-3 (paper)
0-87286-364-6 (cloth)
City Lights Books, 1999

In a compelling challenge to mainstream history, Michael Parenti does battle with a number of mass-marketed historical myths. He shows how history's victors distort and suppress the documentary record in order to perpetuate their power and privilege. And he demonstrates how historians are influenced by the professional and class environment in which they work. Pursuing themes ranging from antiquity to modern times, from the Inquisition and Joan of Arc to the anti-labor bias of present-day history textbooks, History As Mystery demonstrates in fascinating detail how past and present can inform each other and how history can be a truly exciting and engaging subject.

What they are saying about History As Mystery:

“Those who keep secret the past, and lie about it, condemn us to repeat it.

Michael Parenti unveils the history of falsified history, from the early Christian church to the present; a fascinating darkly revelatory tale.”

— Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Pentagon Papers

“Deserves to be an instant classic.”
— Bertell Ollman, author of Dialectical Investigations

“With History As Mystery, Michael Parenti, always provocative and eloquent, gives us a lively as well as valuable critique of orthodoxy posing as ‘history’”
— Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

Contents

History As Miseducation
Mainstream Orthodoxy
The Hunt for Real History
Textbooks: America the Beautiful
For Business, Against Labor
The School as Tool
Priests and Pagans, Saints and Slaves

Triumph of the One True Faith
Silencing the Pagans
Accepting the Powers that Be
Affluent Believers
Saints for Slavery
Bishops and Barbarians, Jezebels and Jews

The Myth of the Devout Peasant
The Curse of Eve
The Burning of Books
Preparing the Holocaust
History in the Faking

Suppression at the Point of Origin
Cold War in the Archives
Classified History, USA
Listening to the Muted Masses
In Ranke’s Footsteps

His Majesty’s Servant
An “Aristocratic Profession”
Purging the Reds
Publishing and “Privishing”
Marketing the Right Stuff
The Strange Death of President Zachary Taylor,
A Study in the Manufacture of Mainstream History
Examining the Examination
Confrontation with the Slavocracy
A Lethal Dose of Cherries and Milk?
Honorable Men and Official History
Against Psychopolitics

Depoliticizing the Political
Dubious Clinical Data
Lenin as Oedipus
The Compulsive Hoover
The Political Hoover
When the Political Becomes Personal