Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong - Hardcover

by James W. Loewen (Author)

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called "jim-dandy pop history," by the bestselling, American Book Award-winning author

"The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history."
--Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans

From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated--and more timely than ever--version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.

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. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:

- a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising

- a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia

- the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery

Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

Author Biography

James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont and lives in Washington, DC.