What does the current Republicans' preferred view of American history look like?

While doing some reorganizing of my digital stuff, I happened across this article from 1959 which is available online that has a lot of relevance to the current McCarthyist/moral panic/hysteria, or whatever we want to call it, over having public schools teaching the supposedly terrifying “critical race theory” or books referencing the fact that the Holocaust once took place. (Bernard Weisberger, The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography Journal of Southern History 25:4, Nov 1959)

Even in 1959, the dominant professional historical view of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in the South was, to put it gently, heavily influenced by the Lost Cause view of American history. That is, it was dishonest and based on a white supremacist view of the world.

Now, I know that the current hysteria is mostly aimed at driving every competent teacher out of public schools and generally cripple if not destroy the public schools. But we do have a good idea of what the kind of history is like that Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott would be adequate to protect innocent students from ever learning that there was ever a mean or violent or racist white person in the US since 1776.

Because a view much like that was actually predominant even in academic history from the late 19th century until well into the 1960s. And that is what Bernard Weisberger addresses in this piece from six decades ago.

[African-Americans are] known to us [historians] almost exclusively through the writings of white men, who, whether well-intentioned or not, were interested parties to a conflict. Conflicts may be solved peaceably, but not wished away. The conflict between white Southerners' determination to be the architects of their own society and black Southerners' desire for a place of dignity in that society did not disappear in 1877. It was "solved" by Northern acquiescence in the subordination of the Southern Negro. Paul Buck's well-known "road to reunion" was paved with the broken ambitions of the freedmen. If Reconstruction is to be correctly branded as a failure, it is just to point out that its aftermath also represented a great failure of democracy. But American historians do not, to judge by their works, like the word "failure" any better than the word "conflict." Neither fits the textbook myths of underlying unity, of unceasing progress, of all problems ultimately coming out right, somehow, in the pendulum swings of time. In the case of the knotty race problem, however, only a hardheaded approach to distasteful truths will yield real understanding. [my emphasis]