Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I grew up at a time where history was taught such that all the founding fathers were heroic men of virtue; All their warts and blemishes were airbrushed from the texts. The message was clear--we should be proud of our American history and we should be proud to be Americans. Now it seems the tide has radically turned such that history is written in terms of just warts and blemishes, such that we should be embarrassed (ashamed?) about our American history and embarrassed to be Americans. In this book however, the proper balance is found; the shapers of early American history are neither painted as perfect pillars of virtue, but nor are they painted as immoral colonizing, land grabbing, slave owning scoundrels. History is more nuanced than that and as the author points out must be viewed through the lens of the time of the events, not the lens of our own time. This book portrays historical figures as flawed, but yet these flaws did not obviate their great achievements; This is not a strictly binary either or world we live in, where there is only all good or only all bad, full stop. All men are flawed, but it is not rational to then conclude, that only flawed bad results can come from flawed men as seems to be the popular notion today. What is unfortunate (based on the paucity of reviews here) is that this book will probably not find its way into the hands of the many people who should read it. What is even more unfortunate, is that it will never find its way into the classrooms where history is being (mis)taught today by ideologues rather than historians.