America, the Barbarous

The colonial past is a mystery to most Americans. Popular memory jams together events and people separated by decades, such as the Pilgrims (1620), the Salem Witchcraft trials (1692), and Benjamin Franklin (born in 1706). We forget that the period between 1607, the year of the founding of the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Va., and 1776, the year of the declaration of American independence, is as long as the period between the events of 1776 and President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in 1945. As problematic as the conflating of chronology is the misleading quality of the remembered colonial past—pastel-colored, mild, and civilized, like Downton Abbey in knee-breeches.