Tall tales of the past
Fabulous stories – fabulous in one or another sense of that word – are the essence of a much-used American history textbook called Making Thirteen Colonies 1600-1740, written by Joy Hakim and published by Oxford University Press.
The stories enchant compactly. On page 9, the book says: “A long time ago – actually, it was almost 4,000 years ago – in the city of Ur, there lived a man named Abraham… Abraham will turn out to be important – to people all over the world – and to us in America.”
We’re never told how or why Abraham is important to American history. And we’re not told that he may be a mythical fellow. The book introduces Abraham and Moses and other biblical people in the same way that, a few pages later, it serves up George Washington.
We also meet the Greek writer Homer…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.