Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Since people probably reached Alaska before any other part of the Western Hemisphere, they probably named North America's tallest mountain thousands of years ago..." (more)
Key Phrases: hieratic scale, marker office, sundown towns, United States, African Americans, Native Americans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Little seems to delight historian James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, more than picking apart the cherished myths of American history. Few Americans study history after high school--instead, Loewen writes, they turn to novels and Oliver Stone movies to learn about the past. And they turn to the landscape, to roadside historical markers, guidebooks, museums, and tours of battlefields, childhood homes, and massacre sites. If you were to trust those sources, Loewen suggests, you would learn, erroneously, that the first airplane flight took place not at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but at Pittsburg, Texas. "It must be true--an impressive-looking Texas state historical marker says so!" Loewen chortles.

In these entertaining pages, Loewen takes a region-by-region tour of the United States, pointing out historical oddments as he travels. For example, a massacre of white pioneers by Indians commemorated in Almo, Idaho, never took place, Loewen continues; neither did many other such events. Indeed, he insists, "throughout the entire West between 1842 and 1859, of more than 400,000 pioneers crossing the plains, fewer than 400, or less than .1 percent, were killed by American Indians." And if you were to visit Helen Keller's Georgia birthplace, over which a Confederate flag flies, you would get the impression that Keller had been an unreconstructed daughter of the Old South, whereas she was in fact an early supporter of the NAACP. And so on.

After finishing Loewen's alternately angry and bemused exposé, readers will likely never trust a roadside historical marker or tour guide again--which may prompt them to turn to history books to check things out for themselves. As well they should. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

A Confederate war memorial in Helena, MT? America's most toppled monument? These are only a couple of the things Loewen discovers during his travels around this highly monumented country. This book takes an often amusing look at the strange and sometimes sinister motivation behind the creation of many of America's historic sites. Good questions to ask when seeing something as simple as a roadside plaque or as complex as Mark Twain's home town are "Who made this?," "When?," and especially "Why?" The answers often reveal attempts to misinform or push certain cultural or political agendas. As the title implies, Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me, The Truth About Columbus) views official history with a certain skepticism that can be entertaining. Recommended for public libraries.AJoseph Toschik, Half Moon Bay P.L., CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; Reprint edition (November 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684870673
• ISBN-13: 978-0684870670
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #331,899 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

153 of 172 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great fun -- and look who it rattled..., August 28, 2000

By	I. Westray (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Hardcover)

If you have any doubts about the lightning rod James Loewen has given us in this book and its predecessor, "Lies My Teacher Told Me," take a look at the few low ratings given by other Amazon readers. The code words are all there -- he's an ivory tower academic, he's anti-confederate, it's all "political correctness," he's racist because he's "anti-white," and so on. Cages have been rattled, it's as simple as that. Some cherished myths go down hard in these books.

Anyone who dismisses this as a "doctoral dissertation" from someone in an "ivory tower" hasn't read any dissertations, trust me. These are funny, chatty, entertaining books. (This one in particular is a great browse, because it's broken cleanly into sections about individual monuments.) Loewen's voice is perfect for this tone and subject, not in any way affected or studied; he's a likeable author, and these are enjoyable books.

Loewen's overarching theme is that history would be a much more vital, constructive force in American life if Americans were actually exposed to its true breadth and depth. Loewen makes many impassioned appeals to primary sources, to the voices and sentiments of actual participants. He gets at those basic themes in a nicely straightforward, common-sensical way -- by comparing primary sources to the schlock we're given in their place. For my money, the humor and pathos, the melancholy irony, in that comparison is a breath of fresh air. Lies My Teacher Told Me used a comparison of several high school textbooks as its departure point. Here Loewen begins by examining historical markers, asking whether each does an adequate job of describing the history it's meant to include. He compares the words on stone monuments to the words in, say, confederate generals' mouths. Dusty academic argument this ain't. It's just plain fun. (I mean, what are we to make of monuments to confederate dead in Montana? Montana didn't have any soldiers on either side...)

To the criticism that Loewen hasn't been prescriptive enough, that he doesn't say what each monument SHOULD include, I would say -- Gee, um, he does. If you read the essays, Loewen goes into extensive discussions about what's missing in many museums and inscriptions. The Nimitz Museum (Museum of the Pacific War) should include, for example, specific quotes from Nimitz about the prospect of invading Japan -- and in any case it shouldn't depict Nimitz as taking a position diametrically opposite from his real one. Also, both this book and Lies My Teacher Told Me have been both general histories and wonderfully ironic lessons in how pressures conspire to prevent real history from reaching people. Dissecting the workings of those whitewashing forces is at least as worthwhile as rewriting the actual texts. Loewen does do both jobs, though, anyway.

But hey, don't believe me -- watch the people who want their ... history left alone squirm, and you'll know you should be in on the fun.

87 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Impressively Accurate History Text, October 14, 2000

By	David Wintheiser (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Hardcover)

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.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Perception Check, December 23, 1999

By	Ronald G. Campbell (Shaker Hts, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Hardcover)

Just as in Lies my Teacher Told Me, Loewen challenges us to question what we have always believed.

Better to be read as a set of stories rather than gospel history. Loewen's left leaning comes through just as in his previous Lies, but sometimes I think that it's his way of taking the opposite position from conventional thinking.

This is not a perfect history book, but it made me think. In addition, I bought more copies to present as gifts to my history loving friends.