The revolution will not be televised. Not the true history of the American Revolution, anyway, the one that may have begun in 1776 but continues still, as women, minorities, and other groups struggle to gain the “self-evident … unalienable Rights” promised in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. In part, that's because, as Rebecca Mark explains in Ersatz America, the nation's memory–industrial complex – its archipelago of museums, historical sites, and the powerful organizations that run them – traditionally honored a glorified version of the country's past that celebrated Founding Fathers such as Jefferson but ignored the injustices done to, and acts of violence committed against, Native Americans and African Americans, including those enslaved at Jefferson's Monticello. This phony, “propagandistic” version of the nation's history is not only factually inaccurate but socially injurious, Mark writes, for by “covering up the pain of diverse moments of ethnic cleansing,” it “encases and paralyzes democratic action” (16).

One can find the “text of a democratic America,” argues Mark, “not in the monuments to nation building, not in statues of our founding fathers,” but in the “texts that result from the movement of the human body” (2). Made not by historical commissioners but by citizen artists, these sources – “visceral and biomorphic graphic scripts” (51), the author calls them – consist mainly of nonliterary artifacts and material culture. Mark seeks to identify and decipher this nonverbal language of resistance that, upon close inspection, can liberate Americans by giving voice to the previously voiceless. Her book, she explains, is “about learning to decipher and value the delicate, nonalphabetic graphic record carved into American memory. These scripts … create a counternarrative to the broad strokes of ersatz national history and in doing so dissolve the often deadly hallucination Americans call national memory” (24).

As examples, Mark points to African American material culture and Native American wampum. Perhaps no episode better clarifies the value of bottom-up history than the great freedom train competition of 1976, however. Hoping to re-create the success of the Freedom Train, which took copies of the Declaration and other historical artifacts on a patriotic tour of the United States in the late 1940s, private enterprise bankrolled the American Freedom Train to commemorate the US Bicentennial in 1976. The train's unapologetic tribute to American greatness rang hollow in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and civil rights, however; so much so that New York transit officials awoke on the morning of 4 July 1976 to discover that graffiti artists had broken into a rail yard overnight and painted The Freedom Train, a Bicentennial-themed mural that covered the length of several subway cars. Transit officials quickly removed the offending graffiti and arrested the artists. To Mark, the stark contrast between The Freedom Train and the American Freedom Train “encapsulates the tension not only between street art and the sanctioned art of 1970s New York but also between citizen art and national art in America” (7–8).

With Ersatz America, Mark joins those scholars – historians John Bodnar, Edward Linenthal, and David Thelen leap to mind – who have measured the distance between “official” and “vernacular” historical memory in the United States.Footnote ¹ What distinguishes her work is its activist tone. As noted above, she expressly seeks to teach readers the analytical tools necessary to liberate them from the “despotic nature of ersatz America” (10) and the “murderous” lies it tells (2).

Such conviction does detract from Mark's work at times, raising questions as to its objectivity. Downplaying the interpretive changes recently undertaken at Monticello and elsewhere, Ersatz America paints with a broad brush, condemning the historical powers that be even as it celebrates any and all examples of “visceral and biomorphic graphism,” whatever that means (3, italics in original). Still, if one can manage to look past such highfalutin’ language, then Ersatz America provides a useful reminder that historical memory conceals as much as it reveals.