A historian debunks four-dozen PC myths about our nation’s past.
Over the last forty years, history textbooks have become more and more politically correct and distorted about our country’s past, argues professor Larry Schweikart. The result, he says, is that students graduate from high school and even college with twisted beliefs about economics, foreign policy, war, religion, race relations, and many other subjects.
As he did in his popular A Patriot’s History of the United States, Professor Schweikart corrects liberal bias by rediscovering facts that were once widely known. He challenges distorted books by name and debunks forty-eight common myths. A sample:
• The founders wanted to create a “wall of separation” between church and state
• Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation only because he needed black soldiers
• Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima to intimidate the Soviets with “atomic diplomacy”
• Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, was responsible for ending the Cold War
America’s past, though not perfect, is far more admirable than you were probably taught. |
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 Check an old encyclopedia |
| Review Date: December 15, 2008 |
| Reviewer: CeeCee, Georgia, USA |
| We still have an edition World Book Encyclopedia published in 1984 and one published in 1965. It is interesting to verify his complaints about modern text books. The re-writing of history is most disburbing. Find an old encyclopedia and check it out for yourself unless you are old enough to actually remember some of the events of the 1940's till today like I am. Many of us are still around who remember when the nasty lies about the USA were told by our enemies; not by our text books, movies, etc. After verifying facts for yourself, please take action to break this pattern of self-destruction. Please confront your local school boards when you find lies in text books. Hit the text book publishers in the "pocket book." One test is that if a text gets Reagan right, it might be OK. Surely you are old enough to remember those actual events! |
Great articles that will give you fresh insight into 48 issues in American History
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| Review Date: September 8, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI |
While I think the title of the book is needlessly provocative, I think this a very useful book for anyone who has been subjected to the kind of indoctrination that passes for history education in too many of our public schools and colleges. If you are looking for some quick information on these four dozen issues, this can help you pass on some solid information that probably runs counter to what your friends believe is so. I said the title is needlessly provocative because not all liberals buy into the points of view this book argues against. However, Larry Schweikart is correct that there is a general cultural agenda that supports the liberal view of things. He starts off each article with two or three short quotes from liberal histories that are countered in that article.
The articles cover notions of America's role in the world since the founding, the issues in the various wars we have fought, what FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, Truman and the Atomic Bomb, the JFK assassination, Reagan, key liberal causes such as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, the Scopes Trial, Columbus and the death of millions of Indians, that pesky wall between Church and State, Women's Rights in early American, the Settling of America and the Indians, and the Robber Barons. Modern issues such as Iraq, 9/11, Global Warming, Media Bias, Educational Bias, and the social theories about our Constitution are also covered. Schweikart admits that saying that the 9/11 conspiracy nuts are liberal is a stretch, but he says he wanted to head off the kind of shoulder shrugs modern texts give to the JFK assassination conspiracy nonsense.
The articles are all relatively short and pack a punch. I am absolutely positive that it will annoy liberals a great deal and some of them will attack the book without bothering to read it. I guess that is a side benefit of the book. Its real point is to push back against what some are trying to make dominant and accepted without critique. Of course, wanting to indoctrinate students is a matter of faith rather than scholarship or education.
If you home school you will definitely want that as an addition to your readings in American History.
You will also want to look at Schweikart's `A Patriot's History of the United States".
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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A great variety of lies to choose from
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| Review Date: September 24, 2008 |
| Reviewer: andris virsnieks, Seattle, WA USA |
We are heading into an election and we have a massive credit crises that could throw us into a deep recession. If you don't have time to read all 48 lies, because you are watching the stock market. And the money market too! I recommend you start with lie #44 "Business Failures and Tax Cuts Combined to cause the Great Depression". You will gain perspective and you will be better able to see how the ground-work for new lies that will surly come out of this current great economic crises is already being laid today.
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It is about time someone wrote this book!
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| Review Date: July 12, 2010 |
| Reviewer: History teacher, |
| As a lifetime history teacher I heartily endorse this book. It is the perfect counterpoint to such best selling drivel as Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. I have spent my teaching career battling revisionism in American History. I think that it a destructive force which teaches our children to hate their own country. I believe what Churchill said about revealing history "warts and all", but I have seen a self-destructive spiral in US History instruction where ALL wars are wrong, ALL presidents have underhanded, ulterior motives for their actions, and America can do nothing but wrong. I never excluded or tried to cover up our mistakes and faults, but I didn't dwell on the negative aspects of our history so much that I turned my students into unpatriotic cynics. I always taught my students to respect all viewpoints and feel that teachers who try to indoctrinate students to their political views are unprofessional and abuse their authority. I despise the political correctness movement and what it has done to history education. We are so obsessed with using the right labels and not offending anyone, that we have watered down history books to the point of making them uninteresting. This book does a great job of debunking the prevailing myths that are taught in many history classrooms today. I only wish that it went into more detail and provided more scholarly documentation for those of us who are so inclined. |
Great for historians or those interested in the truth about the US
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| Review Date: March 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Right-Wing Nutjob, |
| I'm a history major who just recently graduated college, and about half of the myths in the book took me by surprise. While I've never believed in the 9/11 or JFK conspiracies, others had indeed been parroted to me by my professors in college, in particular, that the Civil War was not at all about slavery, or that Truman nuked Japan to intimidate the Soviets; and I bought it, hook, line, and sinker. The author's research on these subjects shows that "states rights" and "preserving the union" were just smoke-and-mirrors to mask the debate over slavery; and the real casualty estimates regarding an invasion of Japan just blew me away. Many other myths are debunked in this book, making it a must read for everybody. It was a wake up call for this history graduate that subtle bias does indeed exist in textbooks, and should be regarded as a caution to current students and their parents, who are most likely paying for their education. |
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