Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
The Whole Truth
Historian James W. Loewen took a trip across America, and what he found made him very angry.
In his previous book, the controversial and bestselling Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen attacked the myths prevalent in high school textbooks. In Lies Across America, he leaves the classroom and hits the road, and he's shocked (exclamation marks abound in this book) to find the same myths and lies at the very sites that are supposed to teach visitors about the country's history. Museums, plaques placed at childhood homes and massacre sites, roadside markers, and gilded statues all offer a "warped" view of American history and serve to create a "landscape of amnesia."
Despite the occasional emotional outburst, Loewen is a lively, engaging guide as he travels from California to Maine. He convincingly demonstrates that slavery, segregation, and the slaughter of American Indians are either completely ignored or utterly misinterpreted. For example, Sutter's Fort, a California attraction, celebrates a site where Indians were not only enslaved but where more than 8,000 were massacred. In Michigan, a bronze statue celebrates Orville Hubbard, a mayor who is valorized for "speedy snow removal" and other civic contributions. Yet there's no mention of the fact that Hubbard was a staunch segregationist who ran a "Keep Negroes out of Dearborn" campaign.
Loewen's book is an effective exposé of the persistence of racism, but it is not merely an attack. The truth, as Loewen reveals it, is often more interesting than the feel-good myths. The sites offer bland portraits of genuinely fascinating heroes and villains. One would never know that Helen Keller, the blind-and-deaf pioneer, was a radical socialist. Sites inform visitors that author Willa Cather "wrote from her heart wonderful tales," but, according to Loewen, she also arrived at the University of Nebraska dressed as William Cather, her opposite-sex twin. The town of Amherst and the University of Amherst celebrate a war hero who, in fact, helped spread smallpox among Indians, a people he referred to as "the vilest race of beings that ever infested the earth."
Loewen notes that Americans "rejoiced when East Germans toppled their statues of Lenin" yet are unlikely to topple their own monuments to evil men. Americans encouraged postimperialist African nations to change their names (e.g., Rhodesia) but a brouhaha would take place if such a tactic were attempted in, say, Amherst. If vandalism and renaming are too radical, Loewen insists that we still "must tell what happened, without the public relations puffery of local boosters." But it's hard to image that towns like Darien, an all-white Connecticut enclave, will take Loewen's suggestion and mount a sign saying, "Darien is still overwhelmingly white; some clubs within it still keep out African-Americans, Catholics and Jews. Thus, Darien poses a problem for the New York metropolitan area and indeed for the nation."
Loewen's angry and witty exposé will surely spark debate. While civic leaders might take issue with his report, the irony is that Loewen actually makes the history of small towns and dead people interesting and lively. His book does what so many sites and museums don't. It presents history as tragic, violent, and dynamic, full of devious eccentrics, arrogant villains, and inspiring heroes.
—Margot Towne
FROM THE PUBLISHER
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.
SYNOPSIS
The author of points out "in what ways we were warped" by distortions of history associated with US historic sites by region (some pictured), e.g., a Helena, Montana memorial to "invented" Confederate dead. Lowen has taught race relations at the U. of Vermont. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Children's Literature - Childrens Literature
Written as a complement to the American Book Award winning Lies My Teacher Told Me by the same author, this text addresses the misrepresentations that often attend national monuments, historical sites, and museums. In this work the author presents 95 specific historic sites. In each instance the current presentation of facts as memorialized at the site is reviewed. Then, a careful reconstruction of the true facts behind the scenes is presented. What unfolds as the reader progresses through this book is a jarring reminder of how skewed our memories of the past can be. For example, several sites related to the Civil War stand out in the overt manner in which issues such as slavery, the massacre of African-American soldiers, and the avoidance of any memory of the horrors of war are subverted. In the area of Native American peoples it is systematically pointed out that many monuments and place names currently still in use are overtly racist in their structure. Labor history sites are also described which re-write or white out the issues of labor oppression in a manner that smacks of censorship. Taken as a whole, or in discrete segments, this is a powerful indictment of how our society chooses to remember the nation's past. It is a wonderfully written and researched book that offers insights into the historiography of our national historic mementos. However, while this text has a great deal to offer it is written for an adult audience. While portions of the book could be used in a high school American History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, or AP History class it would be difficult to find a broader application for the book in a school setting. This is a grand historical effort but one that ismore geared for an adult or collegiate audience. It is also a story that should be read by any current or potential teacher of history. 1999, W.W. Norton, Ages 17 up. Reviewer: Greg M. Romaneck
