Lies Across America : What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong / Twentieth Anniversary Edition

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

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.

“The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history.”—Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans