You're not gonna convince me that wearing the skins of those in your basement can ever be fashionable.
Sorry, but I have a degree in History education, that began as a goal of getting a BS in history so I could be an archivist. I have a hundred or so credit hours in History, and I can tell you are bluffing your ass off. You are reading this book because those who tell you what you think told you it was a good place to have your prejudices spoonfed back to you. It's central premise is the notion that there were no Robber Barons, only wealthy patriotic benefactors.
From the NYT's book review:
''A History of the American People'' will probably prove less than entirely satisfactory even for its natural constituents, churchgoers with a tendency toward conservatism, who judge the book on Johnson's standards. It is not, for one thing, a source to which students can turn ''with confidence.'' There are too many mistakes, not of interpretation (although Johnson's explanation of the First Amendment would give James Madison apoplexy) but of fact. How did he get the idea that all the colonies had adopted written constitutions long before 1776, or that Madison proposed the Bill of Rights in the form that was finally enacted? Some errors border on the comic: important events did occur on June 7, July 2 and July 4, 1776, but not the ones Johnson says happened. The half-truths are more troubling. Nineteenth-century businesses were subject to more regulations than Johnson acknowledges -- imposed, however, not by the Federal Government but by the states, often through what are for us unfamiliar devices like corporate charters. And for all his celebration of available land, Johnson seems curiously untroubled by the gobbling up of plots by large holders, whether in 17th-century Maryland -- where by his own figures 80 percent of the freemen became tenants or wage laborers because all the accessible vacant lands were already owned by others, not, as he suggests, because they somehow preferred those roles -- or in the 19th-century West. So what if half the land given out in North Dakota under the Homestead Act, which was designed to help the ambitious individuals Johnson likes, went to big companies that found ways to manipulate the system? That ''was a small price to pay,'' he says, ''for the immense benefits of having a free market in land -- something which had never before occurred at any time, anywhere in the world.''
As for others seeing you as a creepy collector of hostage sources for your wardrobe? You should be concerned with whether your neighbors have noticed.
