Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

by James W. Loewen

Book Overview

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called "jim-dandy pop history," by the bestselling, American Book Award-winning author "The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684870673
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Touchstone
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.1" x 1.3" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Very valuable and interesting book

For all the shrill complaints, you'll notice no one points out any errors in this book. Indeed, most of the factual history in the book is solid and not even seriously debated by historians. For example - numerous memorials notwithstanding - all serious historians agree that the Confederates, not the Union, burned Richmond and many other Southern cities as they abandoned them. I learned a lot from this book, and I haven't found any serious problems with his facts for for the items I've looked into - although I don't think *everyone* would agree that President Buchanan was gay. Like his earlier book, one of his central points is that accurate and complete history - with all its controversy and complexity - is simply more interesting than the sanitized (and sometimes just plain wrong) version we get in school or from historical monuments. I strongly agree, but some people are very uncomfortable with this view, as is clear from the other comments. He doesn't say our Founding Fathers were "despicable", merely that they were human beings with human flaws - some of them large. For example, he has a lot of good things to say about Thomas Jefferson, but it's a pretty serious omission to sweep the fact that he owned slaves under the rug. If you want to hear only good things about our major historical figures, do yourself a favor and *do not read this book*. He does have a serious axe to grind with the South, but remember he's competing with books like "Slavery: as it was", which is still trying to paint an idyllic picture of black simpletons who really preferred being slaves (read some of the glowing reviews *that* book gets). We would probably complain if Germany still had monuments to Nazis, yet the South has many monuments vicious and outspoken racists. That said, the book does have a few flaws. First of all, he really beats some things to death. For example, he objects to the use of the term "discover" for anyplace where Indians were already living. Fair enough, but he devotes quite a bit of the book to going through these on a case by case basis, and it just gets repetitive. I would have been happy for him to have simply made his case and then given a short list of examples. Second, like his first book, he does interject a bit too much of his personal politics. Usually, this is in the form of explaining how certain monuments came to be, but sometimes it's about monuments that aren't necessarily inaccurate, but just "incomplete" in his view. While I don't think his views are necessarily wrong, these observations give the book a biased tone that it doesn't need to have. The book would still have plenty to say if it stuck strictly to facts and avoided analysis. So, definitely read the book. Check the facts yourself if you don't believe them, and take the politics with a grain of salt.

Take with you on next vacation

This book is a eye opener. It can get a bit boring just reading straight through. My recommendation is take it with you the next time you go on vacation and try to find some of these sites listed in the book.

There She Is, Myth America...

Let me preface this by telling you that I think that the scientific method can be used to do good history; I read Skeptic Magazine; I think that Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and Born To Rebel by Frank J. Sulloway are two of the best pieces of history writing done in recent years. I want to know what REALLY happened in the past. Lies Across America by James W. Loewen helps to teach us history as it was, not how we'd like it to be.If you're like me, then you've seen a lot of roadside plaques in your life. If you're like me, you've probably wondered how much of a plaque says what happened and how much of the plaque interprets what happened in light of a particular point of view. Reading Lies Across America will help you tease the facts from the interpretations. The book is organized by region and Loewen includes write-ups on a wide variety of monuments and plaques from each region. Each vignette about each place can be read independently from the others, so the book does not have to be read straight through or in order. I enjoyed Mr. Loewen's write-ups immensely.We live in a world where extreme afrocentrists want to turn the ancient Egyptians into black Africans and turn them into victims of all those dead white Greek guys who stole their best ideas. We live in a world where holocaust revisionists want to erase the memory of one of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing in the 20th-century. We live in a world where young Earth creationists want to erase almost all of the 4.5 billion years of earth history. And we live in a world where folks want to abandon Thomas Jefferson as a hero because he had a relationship with one of his slaves after his wife died. History is what happened in the past and it isn't always pretty; history didn't always happen the way we might want it to happen. We shouldn't be embarrassed by the fact that James Buchanan was probably gay, we should be embarrassed by the fact that if you ask a tour guide about that fact at his house, you'll probably get an evasive answer. And personally I wish that the first gay president had been a better president, but that isn't the way it happened.

An Impressively Accurate History Text

After reading some of the reviews here, I was a bit concerned that perhaps Mr. Loewen might have skewed his history a bit to help make his admittedly entertaining points. While the book's essays are copiously footnoted, and each essay contains its own bibliography (often running to half a dozen or more citations even for a small three or four page essay), some of the criticisms of Mr. Loewen's work still gave me pause. Since I am merely a casual student of history, I decided to take my questions to the most knowledgeable authority I knew: a history teacher friend whose favorite pastime seems to be finding the subtle historical distortions in otherwise excellent historical and historical-fiction movies like "Gettysburg" and "Saving Private Ryan".After I had read him perhaps two dozen of the ninety-five essays in this book, my friend had no significant criticisms: Loewen correctly identifies not only those areas where there is a difference of opinion among historians, but also where there is agreement among historians that differs with the popular imagination. Loewen also identifies the actual history behind each monument, both the history of the event commemorated and the history of the monument itself where appropriate. He distinguishes between markers which merely attempt to cloud the truth (essay 13, for example), those which blatantly contradict the truth (essay 62), and those which have no relationship to the truth but have instead been invented of whole cloth (essay 15). The book is an impressive piece of historical detective-work, even more so when one considers that the history involved covers nearly the whole of the United States.In the end, my friend enjoyed my 'preview' of Loewen's book enough so that he went out and purchased the hardcover. I already had. The book really is that good.

Outstanding scholarship

This was an AMAZING book. It gives markers and monuments real faces: that is, the faces of the men, women, and organizations who organize and fund said sites and markers to make sure their version of "history" remains on the landscape. Especially telling are the voluminous markers to the Confederacy, continually romanticizing and ultimately misrepresenting its true origin and purpose, as well as those monuments to whites' "discovery" and "civilization" of the "new" world at the expense and near extermination of the native american indian. If this book doesn't debunk or expose at least three erroneous ideas about history you've always held as truth, then you're probably a history professor, and a damn good one. Loewen points out that the past is always more complex than is often represented. As he illustrates, the telling of history is often done by the powerful, the wealthy, the victorious. Loewen argues that to know where we're headed, we need a clear and un-edited understanding of our past. It is this examination of the past, he argues, that our democracy must be able to withstand, and which will ultimately make it stronger. A thought-provoking and immensely entertaining book.