History in need of revising

Think the Middle Ages were drab and dark? Think again.

 A World of Brilliant Colors

In fact, the Middle Ages was the opposite of drab and dreary. It was distinguished for the vivid colors that enriched the streets of the cities, the workplaces and the battlefields.

HT: Thinking Housewife

While we are at it, can we do right by the New England Puritans? In the popular imagination, they are grim, acetic, cruel, and tyrannical. This is an almost complete inversion of the truth. As Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in his Oxford History of the American People,  They "did not dress in black and with steeple-crowned hats; they liked bright colors for clothing, furniture, and hangs." Further:

Puritanism was a cutting edge which hewed liberty, democracy, humanitarianism, and universal education out of the black forest of feudal Europe and the American frontier.

Conservatives are often criticized for romanticizing the past. What is often overlooked is that many thinkers and writers try to romanticize the present by demonizing the past.