Avowedly political in intention, Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past brings together twenty essays on assorted ‘myths’ relating to a wide variety of subjects, including the American creation myth, the drafting of the Constitution (was Madison really so important or was Washington ‘the man’?), American exceptionalism ( a term invented in the 1920s), the nature of feminism (is it really anti-family?), and ‘the vanishing Indian’ (did indigenous peoples simply disappear or were they dispossessed and destroyed?). The importance of contesting historical myth is precisely the purpose of a new collection of essays about American history, edited by Princeton professors Kevin M. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others.
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