From The New York Times
By Andrew Ferguson
Published: May 4, 2008

Never mind his Pulitzer, the best-selling books, the writing jobs at The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker: Tony Horwitz is a dope. Really, he’ll tell you so himself, and often does, though not in so many words, in his funny and lively new travelogue, “A Voyage Long and Strange.” Horwitz is probably best known as the author of “Confederates in the Attic,” an exploration of how the American Civil War and its cultural backwash still move otherwise semi-normal Americans to do crazy things, like sleep outdoors in 19th-century-style long johns while pretending to be Abner Doubleday. In that book as in this one, Horwitz assumes the pose of a baby-boomer Everyman, overschooled but undereducated. He is chagrined at the basic historical facts he was once taught but can no longer remember or, worse, never knew to begin with. Like so many of us, he is the incarnation of Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University, where degrees are awarded for reciting the two or three things the average liberal-arts graduate remembers from four years of college.

Horwitz resolves to remedy his ignorance by embarking on an intensive self-tutorial mixed with lots of reporting and running around. He looks for Columbus’s remains in the Dominican Republic; tracks Coronado through Mexico, Texas and even Kansas; sifts evidence of the Vikings’ landing in Newfoundland; and gives the Anglos their due in tidewater Virginia. The result is popular history of the most accessible sort. The pace never flags, even for easily distracted readers, because Horwitz knows how to quick-cut between historical narrative and a breezy account of his own travels. It’s the same method he used in “Confederates,” deployed with the same success, and unlike many other, less journalistic histories, in which the material is displayed at a curator’s remove, it has the immense value of injecting the past into the present — showing us history as an element of contemporary life, something that still surrounds us and presses in on us, whether we know it or not. Usually not.

The stories he tells are full of vivid characters and wild detail. Among Newfoundland’s Micmac Indians, for example, Horwitz endures a horrifying session in one of their fabled sweat lodges, where, it turns out, sweating is just for openers: “Finally, I stopped struggling and gave in to the torment, entering a trancelike state, less from heightened consciousness than from impaired body function. What spirit I had wasn’t raised; it was crushed.” Among Dominicans, he learns that Spain is hated with an intensity usually reserved for the United States. The hatred is rooted in Spain’s ancient crimes against natives, Horwitz says, but you can also detect the inverted scorn — part envy, part outrage, part sorrow — that the conquered have always felt for their conquerors. Indeed, contempt for the explorers, whether Spanish or English, is now the common default position, not only among the descendants of the Indians they brutally conquered, but also among most of the park rangers, academics and political activists Horwitz encounters.

Mostly, Horwitz shares their view. He is an energetic debunker, but he is also too generous a writer to settle for the easy way out. With his unerring eye for the strange and out-of-the-way, he manages to find in New Mexico a man known as El Patrón, an aging defender of the murderous conquistador Juan de Oñate. And he’s a Democrat! Oñate cut the feet off his victims, but El Patrón is unconvinced of his villainy. “My God, Oñate made this place,” he tells Horwitz. “He introduced cabbages, chili, tomatoes and what not. He created an irrigation system. Oñate did many things for Indians.”

Even in the United States — this present-oriented country supposedly so indifferent to its own history — the past obtrudes. This has long been Horwitz’s theme, and rather than simply explaining it, he demonstrates the truth of it, in story after story. Yet there are times when his treatment seems unaccountably creaky and shopworn. Returning to Plymouth at book’s end, Horwitz celebrates Thanksgiving with the townsfolk. As he has done with the conquistadors and the Norse and the French, he can’t resist making the debunker’s case about the “myths” surrounding the explorers and settlers. The Pilgrims probably didn’t eat turkey or pumpkin pie at a Thanksgiving dinner that they didn’t consider a thanksgiving and to which they didn’t invite the natives, who were in any case weakened with disease, which made them vulnerable to looting — by the Pilgrims, who, by the way, weren’t the first American settlers fleeing religious persecution; that was the Huguenots. The Pilgrims’ arrival in America was, on balance, a calamity, which is why, nowadays, even Plymoutheans mark an annual “Day of Mourning.”

Isn’t this getting a bit old by now? We are three generations, maybe more, into an era in which the once-cheeky assertions of historical revisionism — Columbus didn’t discover America, Europeans invented scalping, the founding fathers were real estate sharpies — have become utterly conventional, the refuge of grad-school plodders and boomer journalists alike. An inheritor and practitioner of this fraying tradition, Horwitz tries, to his credit, to complicate the picture, just a little.

“I could chase after facts across early America, uncover hidden or forgotten ‘truths,’ explode fantasies about the country’s founding,” he writes. “But I’d failed to appreciate why these myths persisted. People needed them.” While the old myths may be false in all their particulars, in other words, it’s probably not so bad if the common folk comfort themselves with lies. Myths, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, satisfy a “psychic need.” But surely this is an unsatisfying conclusion. Are we really supposed to shrug off mass ignorance and self-delusion?

If indeed that’s what it is. Then again, maybe people have believed the historical myths for reasons beyond their own gullibility. Think how refreshing it would be for a writer of Horwitz’s gifts to approach the task of pop history from the opposite direction — not to pick apart a myth but to explain those elements within it that are, after all, true. The myth of the Pilgrims, for example, comes in many shapes and sizes, each containing a different portion of factual accuracy. But underlying them all is what was once understood to be a basic fact: these battered and luckless wanderers carried with them a set of peculiar principles that slowly unfolded into a spectacularly successful experiment in freedom, prosperity and human dignity, something unforeseen and without parallel in all history. If our best writers delight in attacking the myth, it’s probably because they no longer see this truth as self-evident.