Humour very much part of a developing America

As Alexandra Petri clearly states in her introduction, this is a book for that order of person who examines US History textbooks and exclaims, “Oh no! We have only one president’s weird sex letters, and that president is Warren G Harding! We need a book that fixes that!” Now, I can’t say I realised this was a group I belonged to until I read Alexandra Petri’s US History, probably because I’d never heard of Warren G Harding, but I am firmly in that camp now, and consequently very grateful that Alexandra Petri has seen fit to be so accommodating to me and others of my ilk.

Petri’s book ranges from Spanish colonialism right the way through to the present day (well, sort of), and comprises a huge array of highly significant historical documents that the Washington Post humour columnist has kindly invented for our edification. Highlights include a literalised version of The Columbian Exchange imagined as a department store exchange/return desk, in which a disgruntled indigenous person attempts to return typhus, since ‘I brought a potato to this exchange, and I was hoping to get something that was either equivalent to a potato or better than a potato.’ A valid complaint, surely, though sadly unheeded. We are also shown how Elizabeth Cady Staton’s preparations for The Seneca Falls Convention were derailed by the fact that she and the other organisers failed to take into account the universal law that ‘whenever a work-oriented woman goes to a small town for any reason, the town tries to seize her and put her into a Hallmark romance’. And it is illuminating to finally get to read 15-year-old Susan Sontag’s notes on Camp Winnebago, in which teen betrayal and reconciliation, and a marvellous obsession with André Gide, lead to the conclusion: ‘The ultimate Camp statement: I can’t stand it; it’s wonderful’.

Amid all the guides to naming places on new continents, advertisements for Puritan children’s toys, presidential sexting, and previously undiscovered works by Hemingway and Ayn Rand, Petri constructs her simple but important point. Namely, that in a world where history is constantly being fabricated for selfish, ignorant and malicious ends, we’d all be better off with a history that aims to expose itself for the partial medium it cannot help but be. And if it makes us laugh, so much the better. This book will make you laugh and if, like me, you don’t know much about US History, it will also teach you quite a lot as well. The fact that Nikola Tesla was weirdly in love with a pigeon is something I’ll be trotting out on even the most tenuous of pretexts, so that alone makes the book worth reading.