Customer Reviews

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fictions, and Lies in American History (Modern Scholar)

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This is an interesting and educational series of 14 lectures, running under nine hours. You can
transfer it to an MP3 player and listen while doing something else. The audio format works very
well. You will not wish you had a "backspace a sentence" button.

Judging by Amazon's collection of Loewen's works, he has spent most of his career debunking U.S.
history as taught by most teachers, from most books, in most schools, and on historical markers.
Such a concentrated interest could indicate a dull obsession. Fear not. We get many short incident
reports, well told, usually with an explanation of why and how the error was introduced and why it
was carried on.

Most revisionist history is considered anti-American by many conservative critics and is frequently
praised by liberal reviewers. These lectures are mostly non-partisan. I think Republicans fared
better than Democrats, overall, but the corrections are about specific historical events, rather
than attacks on a group.

The last talk has examples of how some people have managed to get some official bad history fixed.

My only problem is about the last portion of the lecture on social class. He has many examples
showing we are not as classless as we like to pretend. But then he claims America is the most
extremely stratified society, and it seems to be a permanent situation. I think all the statistics
he quotes are accurate, but he completely ignores the dynamics, the rise of many previously poor
and the fall of many previously rich.

That is not a reason to avoid the lectures. This is almost all real good stuff.