Welcome to Deconstructed. I'm John Schwartz, writer of The Intercept, and I am substituting

for Ryan Grimm this week, because he's decided he doesn't care about this show or politics

anymore. That's a joke, obviously Ryan cares a lot about Deconstructed, and politics

and he will be back next week. But this week, we're going to be talking about my favorite

subject in the world, what societies remember about the past, or what they think they remember,

and why that may be the most important thing there is about politics.

If you're like me, you grew up with a bunch of vague ideas about America's past in your

head, and what does a vague past meant about what was possible for America in the future.

Here 21st Barma Kavan concentrated its massive air power, and planned the ultimate crushing

defeat of Japan, down to the last bomb. Here was the beginning of the end of the road

to Tokyo. Big ideas like there was such a thing as American exceptionalism from the

start of the United States, and one of those things was that America was super duper powerful,

yet not an empire somehow, and reconstruction after the Civil War was a big failure, and

there's never been such a thing as American socialism because it's just not part of

our DNA. And a million other things that got into my head not because I studied and

thought about them, but just because of some kind of weird osmosis. People like me truly

need the best new book, Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about

our past. It dismantles those specific weird squishy ideas that I had in my head, and

many more, in 20 chapters by 20 different historians. It's edited by Julian Zellazar and

Kevin Cruz, their both professors at Princeton, and in their introduction, they say they put

the book together because we live in an age of disinformation. The line between fact

and fiction has become increasingly blurred if not completely erased. And of course,

...