Jeff Shaara's Vision of Glory

Indeed, Shaara confronts these cynics himself in his preface to Rise to Rebellion:

It has become fashionable in our modern, more cynical time to reexamine our history, to throw a supposedly new light on those who are famous for their accomplishments, to instead expose their faults, to topple the statue of the hero, to replace the honor and respect with the sensational and the shameful, as though it were the only meaningful way these characters can be relevant to today's world. I most adamantly disagree. That we know so much about these characters today is a testament to their accomplishments, their extraordinary achievements, and, yes, their astounding heroism.

Shaara acknowledges their flaws, but points to these as evidence of their humanity. In the end, he is unapologetic in holding up the Founders as historical figures who "deserve to be not only remembered, but revered."

This view remains controversial to this day, though it has gained a greater level of acceptance in mainstream academia and higher literary circles than was the case a decade earlier.

Another angle on this controversy is that, for too long, our nation's history as focused on the "Great Man" approach, highlighting the accomplishments of generals and Presidents, while neglecting the "people." In the minds of some, it is simply not possible to tell history from the viewpoint of the leaders without taking sides against those they led. History is thus the story of a great contest between the 'haves and the have-nots,' each side adversaries in this inevitable tug-of-war. In the words of Howard Zinn, perhaps this theory's greatest proponent:

The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Lussier takes Zinn's philosophy to heart in The Last Refuge of Scoundrels. In fact, Zinn praises Lussier's book as a "delightfully irreverent look at the Revolution" full of "outrageous and lovable characters," the 'lovable' ones, of course, being the fictionalized composites occupying the lower end of the economic scale.

While Zinn (and Lussier) are correct

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