Mainstream American historiography sanitized Jackson by erasing his genocidal Indian policy

Evidence

The leading books on the Jacksonian period, written by respected historians (The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger; The Jacksonian Persuasion by Marvin Mayers), do not mention Jackson’s Indian policy, but there is much talk in them of tariffs, banking, political parties, political rhetoric. If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people—not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2150

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s broader argument throughout Black Marxism about how the racial-capitalist state’s violence gets written out of official narratives, and to the Dunning school material in later footnotes of this same chapter.
• SEED: Angle: the historian’s archive as a site of sanctioned forgetting — how the ‘man of the people’ myth required erasing a genocidal record.