“The Politically Correct Guide to American History”, by Edward P. Moser

127 pages, Crown, ISBN-13: 978-0517704103

The Politically Correct Guide to American History by Edward P. Moser is a tongue-firmly-in-cheek look at American history that pokes fun at the absurdity of today’s Politically Correct snowflakes while simultaneously exposing the awful truth about our own knowledge about this much-neglected subject. Many of us learned our history from high school textbooks written in the post World War II world of the 1950s (God help you if that class was taught by a teacher whose first name was “Coach”; and God REALLY help you if you were stuck with the communist claptrap that is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn). I began this book from the perspective of someone who hates what Political Correctness has done to our culture and whenever possible fights the inroads it is making into our lives, in my own modest way. As the reader romps through the Guide, the stories, while funny, get a bit tiresome if too many are read in a single sitting. This is not Moser’s fault, though; true Politically Correct texts cannot help but be tedious and oppressive, and Moser’s parodies are so deft that they read like the real thing. By rewriting American history in order to better appeal to today’s snowflakes, Moser gives us a humorous – if not terrifying – glimpse of what the history text books of the future may look like.