Rent: 48 Liberal Lies About American History: (That You Probably Learned in School)

This book is an excellent resource that corrects many errors in popular American History textbooks and misconceptions about American history. Every history teacher and school administrator should read this book BEFORE ordering his or her history textbooks. It would also be good reading for everybody else to correct misinformation they may have been taught in school. If you care about facts and real history, you should read this book. Highly recommended!

Professor Schweikart has written a valuable and timely book. He takes on rampant political correctness in the writing of history texts and comes through with a five star performance. He is an expert on U. S. economic history but his breadth is apparent when he takes on standard leftist biases in diplomatic history as well as political history. One interesting thing Schweikart notices is that often a liberal slant will emerge on a topic and become entrenched in the texts. Then other historians will test the liberal idea and find many facts to contradict it. However, the history texts do not make the corrections and the bias is passed on to future generations. Schweikart shows this to be the case in the view of the motives in writing the Constitution and also in the Sacco and Vanzetti case (among others). Schweikart is an expert on economic history, but is very capable when exposing biases on Ronald Reagan, JFK, and LBJ. His emphasis is on modern U. S. history, but he is also excellent describing the first Thanksgiving, Thomas Jefferson, and the Mexican and Spanish American Wars.

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