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

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Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Author:	James W. Loewen
Publisher:	Touchstone Books
Pub. Date:	November 2000
Edition:	1 TOUCHSTO
Binding:	Paperback
Pages:	480
ISBN:	0684870673
ISBN-13:	9780684870670
List Price:	15.00 USD

Amazon Sales Rank:	10,562
Bn.com Sales Rank:	43,299
Amazon UK Sales Rank:	194,528
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Editorial Reviews (Courtesy of Amazon.com)

Amazon.com
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

The New York Times Book Review, Robert Wilson
In fact, Loewen deals less with actual lies on road markers and at historic sites than with attempts to make history more palatable to the public.

USA Today, Tom O'Brien, 11 November 1999
Jim-dandy pop history--informative, interesting, and sure to both excite and inflame than a few readers.

Indianapolis Star, David R. Richards, 13 May 2000
Before you drive off to your next vacation read this book carefully.

Carol Kammen, author of On Doing Local History
He is the high school teacher we all should have had.

Socialist Worker, Helen Redmons, 4 April 2000
Loewen thinks that history belongs to all of us.

Ted Anthony, Associated Press, 25 February 2000
Takes on the juggernaut of American mythmaking.

The Nation, Stuart Klawans, 8 November 1999
Lively and informative... valuable history lessons.

Book Description

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. Lies Across America is a one-of-a-kind examination of sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. With one hundred entries, drawn from every state, Loewen reveals that:
The USS Intrepid, the "feel-good" war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam.
The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Thomas Jefferson's writings to present this conflicted slaveowner as an outright abolitionist.
Abraham Lincoln had been dead for thirty years when his birthplace cabin was built!
Lies Across America is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through our public sites and markers. Entertaining and enlightening, it is destined to change the way we see our country.

Card catalog description
"Lies Across America looks at more than one hundred sites where history is told on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, outdoor museums, historic houses, forts, and ships. Loewen uses his investigation of these public versions of history, often literally written in stone, to correct historical interpretations that are profoundly wrong, to tell neglected but important stories about the American past, and, most importantly, to raise questions about what we as a nation choose to commemorate and how."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author
American Book Award-winner James W. Loewen taught race relations at the University of Vermont. In addition to Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has written The Truth About Columbus, and (with Charles Salles) Mississippi: Conflict and Change, the first integrated state history textbook. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents (Courtesy of Barnes & Noble.com)

	In What Ways Were We Warped?	15
	Some Functions of Public History	25
	The Sociology of Historic Sites	29
	Historic Sites are Always a Tale of Two Eras	36
	Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments	43
	The Far West
1	Alaska Denali (Mt. McKinley): The Tallest Mountain -- The Silliest Naming	51
2	Hawaii Honolulu: King Kamehameha I, The Roman!	54
3	California Sacramento: The Flat Earth Myth on the West Coast	57
4	California Sacramento: Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives	62
5	California San Francisco: China Beach Leaves Out the Bad Parts	67
6	California Downieville: Killing a Man is Not News	70
7	Oregon La Grande: Don't "Discover" 'Til You See the Eyes of the Whites!	74
8	Washington Cowlitz County: No Communists Here!	76
9	Washington Centralia: Using Nationalism to Redefine a Troublesome Statue	77
10	Nevada Hickison Summit: What We Know and What We Don't Know about Rock Art	81
11	Nevada Nye County: Don't Criticize Big Brother	84
	Mountains and Plains States
12	Idaho Almo: Circle The Wagons, Boys -- It's Tourist Season	89
13	Utah North of St. George: Bad Things Happen in the Passive Voice	93
14	Arizona Navajo Reservation: Calling Native Americans Bad Names	99
15	Montana Helena: No Confederate Dead? No Problem! Invent Them!	102
16	Wyoming South Pass City: A Woman Shoulda Done It!	108
17	Colorado Pagosa Springs: Tall Tales in the West	110
18	Colorado Leadville: Licking the Corporate Hand That Feeds You	113
19	New Mexico Alcalde: The Footloose Statue	119
	The Great Plains
20	Oklahoma Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma State History Museum Confederate Room Tells No History	123
21	Kansas Gardner: Which Came First, Wilderness or Civilization?	126
22	Nebraska Red Cloud: No Lesbians on the Landscape	127
23	South Dakota Brookings: American Indians Only Roved for about a Hundred Years	130
24	North Dakota Devils Lake: The Devil is Winning, Six to One	133
	The Midwest
25	Minnesota St. Paul: "Serving the Cause of Humanity"	136
26	Iowa Muscatine: Red Men Only -- No Indians Allowed	144
27	Missouri Hannibal: Domesticating Mark Twain	148
28	Wisconsin Racine: Not the First Auto	151
29	Illinois Chicago: America's Most Toppled Monument	152
30	Indiana Graysville: Coming into Indiana Minus a Body Part	157
31	Indiana Indianapolis: The Invisible Empire Remains Invisible	161
32	Kentucky Lexington: Putting the He in Hero	164
33	Kentucky Hodgenville: Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace Cabin -- Built Thirty Years after his Death!	166
34	Michigan Dearborn: Honoring a Segregationist	170
35	Ohio Delaware: Who Menaced Whom?	173
	The South
36	Texas Gainesville: "No Nation Rose So White and Fair; None Fell So Free of Crime"	177
37	Texas Alba: The Only Honest Sundown Town in the United States	182
38	Texas Pittsburg: It Never Got Off the Ground	186
39	Texas Fredericksburg: The Real War Will Never Get into the War Museums	188
40	Texas Galveston: This Building Used to be a Hardware Store	195
41	Arkansas Grant County: Which Came First, the Statue or the Oppression?	197
42	Arkansas Little Rock: Men Make History; Women Make Wives	200
43	Louisiana Laplace: Suppressing a Slave Revolt for the Second Time	206
44	Louisiana Colfax: Mystifying the Colfax Riot and Lying about Reconstruction	210
45	Louisiana New Orleans: The White League Begins to Take a Beating	214
46	Louisiana Baton Rouge: The Toppled "Darky"	220
47	Louisiana Fort Jackson: Let Us Now Praise Famous Thieves	227
48	Mississippi Hazlehurst: The End of Reconstruction	230
49	Mississippi Itta Bena: A Black College Celebrates White Racists	235
50	Alabama Calhoun County: If Russia Can do it, Why Can't We?	239
51	Alabama Tuscumbia: Confining Helen Keller under House Arrest	243
52	Alabama Scottsboro: Famous Everywhere but at Home	246
53	Tennessee Fort Pillow: Remember Fort Pillow!	250
54	Tennessee Woodbury: Forrest Rested Here	258
55	Georgia Stone Mountain: A Confederate-KKK Shrine Encounters Turbulence	261
56	Florida Near Cedar Key: The Missing Town of Rosewood	266
57	South Carolina Beech Island: The Beech Island Agricultural Club Was Hardly What the Marker Implies	268
58	South Carolina Fort Mill: To the Loyal Slaves	273
59	South Carolina Columbia: Who Burned Columbia?	279
60	North Carolina Bentonville Battlefield: The Last Major Confederate Offensive of The Civil War	288
61	Virginia Alexandria: The Invisible Slave Trade	290
62	Virginia Alexandria: The Clash of the Martyrs	294
63	Virginia Richmond: "One of the Great Female Spies of all Times"	298
64	Virginia Richmond: Slavery and Redemption	302
65	Virginia Richmond: The Liberation of Richmond	305
66	Virginia Richmond: Abraham Lincoln Walks through Richmond	310
67	Virginia Appomattox: Getting Even the Numbers Wrong	317
68	Virginia Stickleyville: A Sign of Good Breeding	320
	The Atlantic States
69	West Virginia Union: Is California West of the Alleghenies?	325
70	District of Columbia Jefferson Memorial: Juxtaposing Quotations to Misrepresent a Founding Father	327
71	District of Columbia Lincoln Memorial: A Product of Its Time and All Time	333
72	Maryland Hampton: "No History To Tell"	338
73	Delaware Reliance: The Reverse Underground Railroad	352
74	Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Telling Amusing Incidents for the Tourists	357
75	Pennsylvania Valley Forge: George Washington's Desperate Prayer	362
76	Pennsylvania Lancaster: "You're Here to See the House"	367
77	Pennsylvania Gettysburg: South Carolina Defines the Civil War in 1965	371
78	Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Remember The "Splendid Little War" -- Forget the Tawdry Larger Wars	377
79	Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Celebrating Illegal Submarine Warfare	381
80	New Jersey Trenton: The Pilgrims and Religious Freedom	383
81	New York Manhattan: Making Native Americans Look Stupid	385
82	New York Alabama: Which George Washington?	389
83	New York North Elba: John Brown's Plaque Puts Blacks at the Bottom!	390
84	New York Manhattan: The Union League Club: Traitors to Their Own Cause	394
85	New York Manhattan: Selective Memory at USS Intrepid	404
	New England
86	Connecticut Darien: Omitting the Town's Continuing Claim to Fame	408
87	Massachusetts Boston: The Problem of the Common	413
88	Massachusetts Amherst: Celebrating Genocide	415
89	Massachusetts Boston: What a Monument Ought to Be	419
90	Vermont Burlington: Shards of Minstrelsy on a Far-North Campus	425
91	New Hampshire Peterborough and Dublin: Local History Wars	430
92	New Hampshire Concord: "Effective Political Leader"	433
93	Rhode Island Block Island: "Settlement" Means Fewer People!	436
94	Rhode Island Warren and Barrington: Fighting over the "Good Indian"	438
95	Maine Bar Harbor: At Last -- An Accurate Marker	442
	Snowplow Revisionism	443
	Getting into a Dialogue with the Landscape	447
	Appendices
A	Selecting the Sites	455
B	Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site	459
C	Twenty Candidates For "Toppling"	460