Rewriting American History
...But now the texts have changed, and with them the country that American children are growing up into. The society that was once uniform is now a patchwork of rich and poor, old and young, men and women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Indians. The system that ran so smoothly by means of the Constitution under the guidance of benevolent conductor Presidents is now a rattletrap affair. The past is no highway to the present; it is a collection of issues and events that do not fit together and that lead in no single direction....
American journalist and author. FitzGerald was born in New York City to a prominent political family; her father was a deputy director of the CIA, her mother an ambassador to the United Nations. Since graduating from Radcliffe College in 1962, FitzGerald has worked as a freelance journalist and regularly contributed to such periodicals as the New Yorker, the Nation, Rolling Stone, and the New York Review of Books. Her reporting in Vietnam at the height of the war there in 1966 resulted in her first book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972); it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction. Her later books include America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979) and Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (2000). See also albany.edu. 