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

This book is a perfect example of the false "two-model" approach common to (but not exclusive to) fundamentalist thinking - we see it in the discussion of politics, religion, and regularly in most any broadcast media debate. This book is rife with allegedly "liberal" opinions (and often just conspiracy theories), many of which are certainly not taught in schools and universities. The book seeks to cover an array of topics, but in the end, sadly it says very little. It reads more as a reactionary quasi-tirade against illusory "liberal" foes somewhere in academia, the author being "true" history's courageous advocate. The writing itself bears the faint din of paranoia.

As mentioned, the book is very broad in scope, covering topics in history, science, sociology, and other areas. The author would do better to comment only in the areas of his expertise, however. The intellectual imprudence of commenting in areas in which he is not erudite certainly shows, especially on scientific topics - apparently a hot harping point of conservative pundits these days. For people interested in and literate in science, the comments are often painfully general and of misconceived origins. The author actually speaks on behalf of Creationsim! (a quite provincial topic in which two-model stupidity always rears it's head).

Particularly offensive is the racist view of Native Americans presented in some entries. The author typifies as warlike the conduct of all Native American peoples, by citing the Mesoamerican sacrifices (Maya, Aztec, Inca), a relic from one region of the world that never fails to dominate people's views, despite the reality of vast cultural diversity. Historians should know better, as this kind of racist stupidity only comes about when a person cares more for asserting politics than in people / history itself. To generalize as barbaric all the pre-Columbian peoples so carelessly, failing to make distinctions in culture and geography, is monumentally biased. In it's lack of distinction, it is quite racist. What's more is that the allegedly "liberal" view of Native Americans as "great environmentalists" is just as ridiculous and historically ignorant the view of them as itinerant, warlike "barbarians" - again, we wittness the callous stupidity of two-model logic. Political axes, however, do not heed accuracy and subtlety - despite all their grinding, they remain carelessly blunt objects.

That recurring false duality is the biggest problem with this book - it perpetuates the ongoing idiocy of political dichotomy. The irony being, of course, that my negative view of this book will, often by default, make me a "liberal" in the minds of those (likely "conservative") who support this author. This is a sad social situation in which the USA has found itself - the almost childlike implicit ignorance of "two-model" logic - i.e. the complete typification of minds and peoples into gigantic mutually opposed waste receptacles. It is all very sad to see important discussions deteriorated to this point. I hope people who might read this book will actually care to take interest in the topics it discusses, and not just the author's often skewed words and opinions. I propose that this book is -not- a lesson in history foremost, but rather a lesson in the obstinate stupidity, intellectual damping, and real-world danger of broad, generalizing, political paradigms and thier forced dichotomies. While you read this book, look for these false paradigms, as this will at least give the book some value as an intellectual exercize.

Historians shouldn't promote political agendas, especially when to make their point, they make fools of themselves. This should be true for both conservatives and liberals. Larry Schweikart is Professor of History at the University of Dayton and he believes it his mission to point out lies about American History that liberal scholars are poisoning the children of today as the kids learn about our past. Schweikart wants to set the record straight. Beginning with the book jacket where it is proclaimed that the "problem is authors who actually distort facts and manipulate data in an effort to appear objective and unbiased," Schweikart proceeds to debunk what he sees are lies about our history. He continues in the first paragraph of his introduction to claim that the image of the KKK , "not Reconstruction" was the image that depicted American life in the 1920s. He then sets up the New Left historians of the 1960s as perpetrators of the lies that appear in our school textbooks.

Wow. This guy is an idiot. Reconstruction ended as a compromise of the 1876 disputed presidential election. By the 1920s it was fifty years behind us. The New Left never amounted to a true block of scholars as they discredited themselves and promoted unsustainable positions decades ago. In fact this is my main complaint about Schweikart, he discredits lies that he himself invented and attributed to liberals to make himself appear the hero. It is like the exterminator who releases mice into your house then charges you to get rid of them.

Of Schweikart's 48 "lies" I (who attended both American public schools and American public colleges) had never heard of most of them. In Lie #1 he claims that liberals believe American presidents were isolationists. No president has ever been a true isolationist. Lie #2 claims business interests propmoted wars with Mexico and Spain. Actually, one cannot compare these two wars so simply as they were fought in different periods of our history under different sets of values. In 1898 the concept of imperialism was not unpopular with many, only a minority which included Andrew Carnegie. Lie #4 claims Truman used the atomic bomb to intimidate the Soviets with American diplomacy. Old Larry should have said intimidate them with American military might. Lie #5 Kennedy was killed by LBJ. Larry's stupidity is ramping up now. In Lie #7 Schweikart states the peace movement were not the dupes of the KGB. If Larry ever should read his Bible, he might be suprised that Jesus advocated peace and love, making Jesus the first dupe of the KGB. He says in Lie #8 that Reagan wanted to provoke a war with the USSR so he promoted Star Wars. I never heard of this lie before. In Lie #11 he claims the 9-11 attacks were a government conspiracy. He must be confusing Pat Robertson with those darned liberals again.

Schweikart's list goes on. He takes the typical potshot at Thomas Jefferson "who spoke of libertyin the ideal and who held slaves in reality" (p. 77) which could be likewise of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, the Lee family, and nearly every other founding father from Virginia. On page 168 Schweikart claims the "Native Americans were already on a path to exterminate the buffalo before white hunters accelerated the process." He adds in the next line that 3000 Assiniboin Indians wiped out 600 buffalo. There were tens of millions of buffalo at first European contact. Any culture that depended on buffalo for their existence would understand how to manage the herds. Killing 600 would not threaten the herd. Even the 450,000 some (undocumented) estimates from the 1850s would not exterminate the buffalo. The buffalo were eradicated by whites as an attempt to end the lifestyle of the Plains Indians. Who, by the way, in the 1850s was calculating how many buffalo the Indians harvested? Larry cites no source.

Lie #34 truly demonstrates Schweikart's ignorance about Indians. He claims the lie is the first Thanksgiving took place because the Indains saved the Puritans from their own ineptitude. Larry, there is no lie here, this is exactly what happened. First of all the Pilgrims were not Puritans, they were separatists. Puritans wanted to "purify" the Anglican church. The Pilgrims saw Anglicanism as a lost cause not worthy of saving. So they set sail for Holland and lived there for a few years. But then they sought a greater degree of separation so they set sail for America, in September. When they arrived in November they realized they had no way of providing food for themselves through the New England winter. If the Pilgrims were so capable, why would they set sail in the fall, with no chance of planting a crop before winter? They truly were inept as the massive numbers of deaths from starvation that first year reflect.

Let me cite one last example of Schweikart's misguided purpose. He says in his introduction that James J. Hill built a transcontinental railroad without one dime of support from the federal government. Hill built his railroad with financial support from the land grants provided by the federal government. Governments aid business with means other than outright cash subsidies. Other railroads were built with government money. If Larry doubts this, I call on the example of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Credit Mobilier schandal.

He goes on and on making up lies so he can heroically knock them down. Anyone gullible enough to believe that what he claims are lies dominating the American education system is simply as misguided as Dr. Schweikart. He is like the person who invents a computer virus they offers to sell the anti-virus software that removes it. As I said earlier, I have not heard of most of these so called lies. Schweikart wants to be the mouthpiece of the conservatiive movement, but any true historian will want to only promote knowledge, not a political position.

I read this book hoping to improve my understanding of American history, almost despite the cranky title. I read a similar critique of mainstream history teaching from the left, [[ASIN:0743296281 Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong]], and found it pretty interesting and insightful.

However, as one dips into this book, it doesn't take long to see that there are serious problems with Mr. Schweikart's approach. The "48 lies" rhetoric isn't merely part of a sales-friendly cover but is repeated--in an almost paranoid way--throughout the book. But what qualifies as a "lie" in Schweikart's neighborhood is any divergence from a right-wing (NOT conservative) viewpoint.

A couple of the purported "lies" will serve to illustrate what I mean. Lie #21 is "Lee Harvey Oswald Shot JFK Because He Was a Deranged Marine Not Because He Was a Communist." Remember when we were in third grade, and we were taught that? You don't? C'mon, my school textbooks had an entire chapter on deranged marines! In fact, of the 48 enumerated "lies," only five or six were commonly taught in school. Most of the rest are chip-on-the-shoulder conservative stereotypes of what a "liberal" believes.

Schweikart tips his hand that objective history is not his aim, but instead the creation of a counter-polemic that conforms to right-wing canon. It is a wonder to behold what he is able to do with a compound sentence and a superlative. Lie #16: "Prohibition Was Unpopular from the Beginning and Failed in All Its Objectives."

Other "lies" are about the liberal position of current controversies. Like Lie #37: "Global Warming is a Fact, and It's a Man-made American-Driven Problem." Or Lie #18: "Senator Joseph McCarthy Concocted the 'Red Scare' and There Was Nothing to Fear from Communist Subversives." These take the rhetorical tactic of combining a large truth with a trivial debatable point, and then pretending that the larger point has been disproven.

Finally, Schweikart has to work through a number of conservative tropes, that suggest the ideological predispositions he's working from. Among his assertions are that federal product safety regulation does not increase public safety, that Ronald Reagan did not significantly increase the deficit, and that anti-trust law is anti-consumer. I'm okay with this, but not in a book that purports to challenge ideological slant in history.

In short, Schweikart is simply a ideological crank, raving because someone else's interpretation of history, and not his own, has prevailed. I was utterly prepared to accept the notion that there were 48 interpretations of history (I'm not prepared to call even one of them "lies") that could be replaced with more accurate understandings. But, because this is such an ideological product, and so much of it is dishonestly argued, it really is better understood as an insight into the modern right-wing mind.

Apparently Dr. Schweikart specializes in 19th century American finance and banking. That is his niche, and I've read through several of his articles on his specialty which are well-researched and persuasive. It is unfortunate that I cannot say the same for this piece of polemic. No, I'm not offended a liberal. I'm offended as a historian. I have heard very few of these "liberal lies" and he seems to be taking swipes at non-existent apparitions. The chapter on Columbus in particular is so riddled with misinformation and stubborn, willful ignorance of historical fact as to be nearly unreadable.

Looking at his other books, they're purely political in nature and not objective in the slightest. It's no wonder that they're on the reading list for conservative and religious book clubs. They're so filled with hero-worship of the Founding Fathers and the other "Great Men" of US history that they areutterly useless as legitimate history books. No, I am not offended as a liberal but as a historian.

Take this book for what it is: a puff piece intending to make historically illiterate American, conservative Christians feel superior for being historically illiterate American, conservative Christians.

1. Everything on this list is either true and should be taught but Schweikart doesn't like it, or it's blatantly false--AND ISN'T TAUGHT, so he's trying to make it seem like our history classrooms are full of terrible teachers, when they aren't. No actual history teacher tells kids that LBJ had JFK killed. Unless he or she is an awful teacher, but being liberal doesn't make you an awful teacher, any more than being conservative does--and liberals don't generally believe that LBJ had JFK killed. We (teachers) don't teach that the media are now or have ever been fair, free, and balanced--that's why we require students to gather multiple sources and examine them all critically, and why we teach things like yellow journalism and the role of the media in the Spanish-American War. We don't teach that early America had few gun owners--the main reason for the early success of the Continental Army was the proliferation of personal weapons that most colonists had, if they could afford them, for hunting. Abraham Lincoln didn't free the slaves (thanks, 13th Amendment, passed by Congress and ratified by the states after Lincoln's assassination), and he was trying to weaken the South, not beef up his own troop strength. We have economic evidence that the Reagan tax cuts had long-term negative effects. For Schweikart to dedicate this book to honest historians who let the evidence guide their worldview and not the other way around, and then present a book that does nothing but promote conspiracy theories and lies with little real and peer-reviewed evidence to back it up, pretty much sums everything up.

These are not "liberal" positions, nor are they "lies." They are controversial topics in history, for the most part debated by scholars of varying political persuasions. The argument that "political correctness" (which remains undefined throughout the book) has somehow influenced the debates on, or presentation of these topics is inane and paranoid. Try reading instead, Lies My Teacher Told Me.
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467300355&sr=8-1&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me

The problem with this book is that the "liberal lies that we learned in school" to which this author is responding, do not exist! It is made up! NONE of the things that this author argues are taught in schools actually are taught in schools! He is a master of strawman arguments.

Of course, that's his intent! Like Jonah Goldberg and his preposterous "liberal fascism" book, which is 100% fictional, this author has a political agenda to push. And push it he does! And if that requires picking and choosing "facts", ignoring some history while carefully coloring other history, taking things out of context, ignoring inconvenient and contradictory data, and all that jazz . . . well, so be it! This is a partisan exercise, NOT a work of academic history.

Don't get me wrong. If you're an uber-conservative or a tea-party hatemonger, you'll LOVE this book! It's filled with clever turns of phrase that will make you feel oh-so-satisfied with yourself and with your opinions. But if one is looking for FACTUAL DATA upon which to seriously analyze US history, the book is WORTHLESS. Utterly and completely worthless.

Right-wing propaganda. The guy's a Twitter nutcase. He's not a real historian -- collaborates with the alt-right crowd at Breitbart. American disgrace.

Most of this books is just right drivel, it's completely debased of any sort of verification and a lot of the stuff no one believes anyways. I was not taught any of this in school, and some of these "lies" are conspiracy theories no one believes anyways.

Most of this books is just right drivel, it's completely debased of any sort of verification and a lot of the stuff no one believes anyways. I was not taught any of this in school, and some of these "lies" are conspiracy theories no one believes anyways.