Historian Ken Burns delivered an address that aired on C-SPAN last month. The Granite state scholar’s speech wasn’t about his slanted PBS series, The Civil War. Nor did he focus on Baseball, his error-filled documentary in which the national pastime is significant primarily because of its relationship to race relations and labor unions. Instead, a ranting Burns unloaded a semi-hysterical stump speech at a campaign rally for Al Gore. For Burns, there is no difference in campaigning and manufacturing pop-histories for television. It’s all activism after all.

The political bent of historians can be witnessed in overt acts like electioneering of the sort Burns took part. It can be more subtle, like Arthur Schlesinger’s ranking of the Presidents, in which he polls historians sympathetic to his outlook—retired politicians Mario Cuomo and Paul Simon participated in the most recent survey—ensuring his desired conclusions upon the selection of the participants.

Recent examinations of the political affiliations of college professors, too, demonstrate an extreme bias among historians. Stanford’s department of history houses 22 Democrats and two Republicans. Cornell has 29 Democrats and zero Republicans. Dartmouth also pitches a shutout, with 10 professors registered as Democrats.

To get a balanced account of our past, it has almost reached the point where one must avoid the American academy entirely. A History of the American People, the latest offering from Paul Johnson—he’s a Brit, he’s not an academic—delivers the kind of history not commonly found on the reading lists of American college professors. As he notes in the preface, "I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness." In doing so, he is able to tackle subjects oft ignored by academic histories, e.g., religious and industrial history.

From the time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, religion was to play a central role in American life. Johnson notes the religious origins of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other institutions of higher learning older than the Republic itself. "The Great Awakening," Johnson maintains, was "the proto-revolutionary event, the formative moment in American history, preceding the political drive for independence and making it possible."

"The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution," asserts Johnson, "is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event. That fact was to shape the American Revolution from start to finish and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being."

Johnson’s independent streak is illustrated in his even-handed treatment of relations between the numerous Indian tribes and an expansionary America. "The Indians were not murderous savages, who ought either to be detribalized and assimilated completely...or exterminated," he observes, "Nor were they sophisticated-primitive innocents, living in utopian and preservationist communities, brutally disturbed by cruel and heedless invaders of European extraction."

Johnson reports the many atrocities carried out by whites against Indians. Rare among chroniclers, he also notes the many atrocities carried out by Indians against whites.

"Let the white race perish!" proclaimed Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief idolized in many current textbooks. "Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children that their very breed may perish! War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!"

Following Tecumseh’s rhetoric, to no one’s surprise, his followers went on the warpath. At the Deep South outpost of Fort Mims, more than 1,000 Creeks murdered 553 men, women, and children. Only fifteen were able to escape and the Indians exited with 250 scalps. Hate speech, as we are incessantly reminded, has consequences.

It is significant that the author sees the period between the Revolution and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln as something more than just a preface to Civil War. Also of importance is his rejection of the latter third of the 19th century being labeled as a time of "robber barons" or a "gilded age." Instead, Johnson sees it as a time of great economic progress that would eventually give rise to the likes of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, and Henry Ford.

"Between 1859 and 1914," observes Johnson, "America increased its output of manufactured goods, in value, no less than eighteen times." With tariffs at the gates and a free market within, America jumped from fourth- to first-place in manufacturing output.

Though a time of great plenty, it was not an era of greed. When Andrew Carnegie wrote, "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced," he was not engaged in empty sloganeering. The Scottish immigrant spent more than $350 million on charitable causes, including millions for the construction of more than 2,800 public libraries. Nor was Carnegie alone among "robber barons" in using private fortune for public good. It was Colonel Jim Fisk who came to the rescue of Chicago after its great fire of 1871. Likewise, railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman heaped generosity upon San Francisco following the infamous earthquake of 1906. Leland Stanford, Daniel Drew, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—derisively labeled "robber barons" by the denizens of academia today—all gave more than their surnames to establish famous centers of learning.

Yet the greatest gift these men gave the public were more jobs at escalating wages, reduced costs for consumers, and better products and services. It is because they lived as walking billboards to the success of the capitalist system—nearly all of the major industrialists were self-made men—that they have been denigrated by historians so hostile to the free market.

If the Presidents of the Industrial Age seem mediocre in comparison to the great tycoons, it is because, with the exception of Grover Cleveland, they were. Johnson’s views of the Presidents—from Washington through Clinton—leaves the reader with little room to interpret his opinions.

Madison’s war excursions were "foolish," "irresponsible and reckless," and based on "endless confusion." Wilson "first introduced America to big, benevolent government," he based his war effort on "propaganda," and his administration "ended in deception and failure." Kennedy was "one of the biggest frauds in American political history," "a political huckster," and "a propagandist rather than a serious statesman." The election of 1960 was a fix that "Nixon probably won by about 250,000" votes.

Special contempt is reserved for Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. The author notes that "both administrations, by their meddlesome activism, impeded a natural recovery," with regard to the Great Depression. "We didn’t admit it at the time," Roosevelt advisor Rex Tugwell permitted in 1974, "but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started." Hoover increased government spending dramatically and ran up huge deficits. He slashed taxes then raised them to almost unprecedented levels. This incoherent, anarchic economic policy was what Roosevelt was to adopt and christen "the New Deal." Consequently, the country remained mired in a deep depression through much of the decade.

Roosevelt’s handling of foreign policy was in many respects even more disastrous. "Stalin has got the President in his pocket," noted Sir Alan Brooke, chairman of the British Chiefs of Staff. FDR, in a moment of extreme naivete, is quoted on Stalin: "I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace." Johnson adds, "what FDR, over Churchill’s protests, gave to Stalin was not his to give."

A History of the American People diverges most from the current scholarship emanating from higher education in its defense of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Upon taking office, Harding slashed taxes and cut government expenditures by 40%. Coolidge remained on this course. As a result of their laissez-faire policies, both presidents are damned by an intelligentsia that genuflects to the planned economy. The 1920s, Johnson declares, were "probably the most enjoyable decade in American history." Per capita income rose by more than 25% in the eight years of the Harding-Coolidge presidencies. The misery index was at its lowest point in U.S. history. To blame the Great Depression on the wealth of the Harding-Coolidge years is to ignore the fact that economic collapse occurred on a worldwide scale.

A History of the American People closes with a charge of optimism. America "is a human achievement without parallel," the text proclaims. "It is still the first, best hope for the human race," Johnson professes. "Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity."