Not to rain on the parade, but ...

A Canadian "former historian" weighs in on the American revolution, calling it a failure in this op-ed piece in the Washington Post. I don't imagine many persons ever heard of Paul Pirie, including myself, but the article has been scarfed up by the mainstream media and I read it this morning on Yahoo! following the link to the Washington Post.

Not that it offers any penetrating analysis. His opinion is short and draws mostly on CIA factbook references What Mr. Pirie fails to note is that Canada probably wouldn't have enjoyed its sense of autonomy had not the British failed in securing the colonies. It was as a result of the American Revolution that Britain began to consider extending a higher degree of self-governance to its colonies and eventually came up with the idea of the Commonwealth.

Understandably, Canadians are proud they withstood the invasion of 1812, when the United States threatened to annex Canada. But, Pirie seems more interested in calling out the discrepancies when it comes to the crime and the distribution of wealth between Canada and the US, than he does getting into the root causes of the Revolution and its aftermath. I guess this is why he is a "former historian."

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

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Dispatches from Vilnius

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