History Corner: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook from the new Press,via EdelweissPlus, free of charge, for blog review purposes on this blog. No compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it, all opinions are my own

And now for a reissue of a book from 2010, that still rings true today!

Synopsis:

From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated—and more timely than ever—version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.

In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:

• a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten slave uprising

• a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia

• the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery

Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

Review

The original edition of this book (back in 1999), was part resource book, part history book, part travel book, and one that everybody in the family found interesting. This updated version unfortunately has been rewritten with a certain slant (much like the sites it claims to have the same bias). I should have known when one of the cover blurbs was from a former NOLA mayor, responsible for taking down historic monuments (often in the middle of the night), to 'avoid' aspects of NOLA's history. As we know, when history gets erased like that, then state thought isn't far behind. I previously have enjoyed Loewen's books, and his ORIGINAL book of Lies My Teacher Told Me, has been part of my daughter's history learning curriculum. Unfortunately, this book won't be in that transcript of her history resources. While there is a lot of good info, it gets SO overshadowed by the tunnel focus slant, that you won't see the forest for the trees blocking it. It's sad to see a good historian get so caught up in the modern historical revisionism. How do we learn from our past if it is erased, as he would prefer? Not a book I can recommend anymore.

About the Author:

James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and the forthcoming Lies My Teacher Told Me for Young Readers (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont and lives in Washington, DC.