The late great scholar James Loewen's Lies Across America is a masterful work of history that challenges us to take a closer look at historic sites throughout the nation that illuminate the truths about the US. A timely read that challenges some conservative narratives about US history.

Okay definitely a different kind of book than I am use to. It was interesting to see his views on different ideas but not something I would read again.

Although this was interesting, there were several instances where it was repetitive to content found in his book, Sundown Towns. There also was several repetitive occurrences within this book. Overall I was disappointed 2 and a half stars.

3.5 stars. Loewen takes us across the country and exposes the truth behind some of our historical markers, signs, sites and statues > very relevant and poignant, considering the current reckoning with systemic racism and removal of monuments to traitorous racists. The amount of info given on the actual history these sites ignore/whitewash/cover up is detailed and often astounding; Loewen clearly knows his stuff. That density of information took me down some rabbit holes, which made reading this book slow (but rewarding). I'll never look at a historic site the same way (with blind acceptance of "fact") again.

Although I enjoyed “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” I found this book to be less fascinating. I believe his books make the majority of us Americans think twice about what we are taught or have been told about American history, however, this book’s focus on monuments, plaques, and road markers across the nation was rather flat. History is just that: His story, or her story. Monuments, statues, or markers put up by various groups are, of course, going to be slanted towards the members’ beliefs or interpretations.
Many of the topics the author mentions is not so much a blatant lie, but either a slant on what actually happened, or a lie by omission of information.

I was very excited to read this, but after 40 chapters or so, I lost all interest. The findings by the author all started to sound the same.

I really enjoyed a great many things about this book. Characters were fleshed out and the plot was well spaced. Some of the secondary storylines could've used a bit more page space but all in all an enjoyable read!

Lies Across America by James W. Loewen: What Our Historic Sits Get Wrong is a solid look at less the wholesale error of historical markers, monuments, and the like and more the distorting and omitting of history, which I grant may be a distinction without a difference. It’s a worthy and valuable book and does at times provoke the reader to think more deeply about both our history and the way we make and mark that history. It is also not a “reading” book so much as a “reading for a while then stopping then reading again for a while” book, as to go through it in just a sitting or two ends up perhaps deadening the reader’s thinking rather than stimulating it.

There is a repetitiveness to the many examples, and I suppose the question of if that is a flaw or not resides in whether one views this as a cataloging of the actual sites (nearly one hundred of them) or as an exploration of what leads to the creation and the maintenance of such sites (with the added question of how do we “fix” or rid ourselves of them). If one sees the goal as the former, then Loewen should be commended for his lengthy if not, sadly, exhaustive listing. On the other hand, if one prefers the latter, then at some point the reader is almost certain to say, “OK, I get it already. The Daughters of the Confederate Veterans and other such organizations were less concerned about historical events and more about contemporary oppression.” It’s not a bad lesson to learn, just the opposite, but it’s also a pretty easy lesson to learn, making the book on some level akin to those worksheets math teachers would once upon a time assign with 40 problems even if successful completion of the first five or ten sufficed to prove one’s mastery of the skill.

The sites are of course nearly all repugnant (though there is a spectrum) and their continued existence is disheartening. But what also comes clear is that progress has been made over the past few decades, as witness for instance the inclusion of slave life in all its brutal horror at sites that formerly glorified or simply ignored it. That’s not to say there isn’t room to continue that progress, and Loewen offers up some pragmatic (and a few less so) ideas for how to do so.

I’d call this a good library book rather than a book to purchase, and I’d label it as well an important book to read, even if reading it in its entirely isn’t wholly necessary.

This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in US History. In fact, I wish every high school student had this as required reading. My degree is in history, and it is a sad truth that misinformation is so ingrained that people will argue the facts even when presented with concrete evidence. Very important and highly recommended!

I really enjoyed reading this book. Highly recommend that libraries purchase it, both public and school libraries. (As well as libraries at colleges/universities). I will be sharing this book with some friends in the history department, as it may work for some of their classes.

Thanks to The New Press and NetGalley for providing an early copy to review.

A fascinating book that rationally and logically presents the argument for removing statues and historical markers that celebrate ‘false’ history. Not being from the states but having lived there I found the subject matter in this book not only interesting but the arguments contemporary and relevant to our history in Australia. A great read. Highly recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley for the ARC.

This book was a bit of a slog to get through but it was interesting. The facts presented definitely made you think about how you absorb history. I liked how the citations were right aftet each chapter although it did make it hard to read e book wise. I would recommend this book to anyone to improve their critical thinking

I live in Guelph, a mid-sized city in Southern Ontario. We like to think of our home as a green and growing place, full of people who are alert to environmental and social justice. We think we know our history. Guelph was founded in 1827 by a Scottish novelist and businessman named John Galt. As a director of the Canada Company, it was his job to open the countryside for immigrant settlers. There’s a bronze and granite bust of him outside our former city hall downtown. It’s the courthouse now. There’s a school named after him. The Ontario Civic Holiday on the first Monday in August is called John Galt Day here in Guelph.

You don’t mess with John Galt’s memory. He has only one rival in our municipal consciousness. John McCrae, the military doctor who wrote the famous poem In Flanders Fields was born here. He also has a school named after him, and a statue outside the civic museum. His birthplace is a National Historic Site. Any suggestion that his poem is not a great one, or that it is not a plea for peace, can get a person’s citizenship revoked.

How accurate are our manufactured memories of these two men? It depends on who you ask. James Loewen has provided us with a guidebook that can help us find out.

The American sociologist and historian has updated his 1999 book in which he examines monuments erected across his country to honour historic people and events. A dismally large number of them honour Confederate military and political leaders. A lot are racist. A very large number have plaques that do not accurately describe the events commemorated. Historical monuments are not covered by any truth in advertising laws.

It’s a well-known adage that history is written by the winners. Loewen makes a further point that statues and other monuments determine how this history will be remembered. Most commemorate military victories and significant battles. This has consequences. One of these is that memorials tell us what is worth dying for, which turns out to be mostly the state.

There are hundreds of thousands of historic markers scattered across the United States, including museums, statues, tombstones and roadside plaques. Loewen uses about a hundred of them to illustrate his points. Some are, in a bizarre way, amusing. A statue in Lexington, Kentucky, of Confederate General, John Morgan, for example, had him riding a stallion. In fact, he rode a mare into battle. The sculptor obviously thought no females of any kind belonged on a battlefield.

Loewen suggests ten questions to ask at a historic site, and twenty monuments that should be removed as soon as possible. There are others that should follow. Photographs could be taken and placed in museums to illustrate the terrible history of race relations in America.

As we saw in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years ago, America still has plenty of white supremacists who will fight to protect the memory of the Confederacy. They rioted, and killed a woman, to protest the removal of Confederate monuments. The American president, Donald Trump, said some of them were very fine people.

I used to think the southern states lost the American civil war because it was all about the right to own slaves and slavery was abolished. Loewen makes the point that the Confederacy won the war. He says it was really about white supremacy, of which slavery was one manifestation. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow laws were enacted formalizing segregation and sundown laws were passed requiring black people to leave white neighbourhoods at dusk.

Canada has had similar experiences with the removal of monuments. Edward Cornwallis is generally regarded as the founder of Halifax. In 1749 he issued a proclamation offering to pay for the scalps of Mi’kmaq people. In 2017, a rally calling for the removal of his statue from a park named after him was disrupted by a white supremacist group called the Proud Boys. The statue was finally removed in 2018.

Another example is the Langevin Block of our Parliament Building in Ottawa. It was named after Hector-Louis Langevin, one of the architects of the residential school system that abused thousands of Indigenous children. His name was removed, but not replaced by anyone else. In an act of typical Liberal blandness, it is now known for what goes on inside. It is now called “the Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council.” They can’t be on the wrong side of history if they say nothing about it.

Now, what about Guelph’s founding father? When the city was up and running, John Galt was fired by the Canada Company because of his poor management practices. When he returned to Scotland, he was sent to debtor’s prison for a few months. These are minor blemishes on his record.

A plaque near the River Run performing arts centre says, among other things, “Galt was conscientious and hard working and showed considerable humanity in his dealings with the company’s pioneer settlers.” What it doesn’t say is how he and his company dealt with the pre-pioneer population.

The plaque stands near the spot where Galt chopped down a tree to begin clearing land for Guelph. It wasn’t his to remove. It belonged to the Anishnaabek First Nation peoples and was ceded to the settlers through Treaty 29 in 1827, just before Galt swung his axe. Why doesn’t the plaque say anything about the people who were already here?

History is a complicated business. It is always subject to review and re-evaluation. Loewen quotes the American philosopher George Santayana who said, “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”

Lies Across America lays out a useful guide for evaluating what needs to be done. The second edition is scheduled for release on 24 September 2019.

On a walking tour of Barcelona, our guide told us the story of Christopher Columbus. He was an Aussie who said he was qualified to act as Barcelona guide because he was a graduate student in history at the local university. I cornered him afterward and said, as a history student, you surely know the Columbus story you just told us was completely fabricated. He said, you have to give the people what they want. I said, no, people want to know the truth, your tour would be vastly improved if you retold the Columbus myth and then debunked it with the true history.

I only learned about the Columbus myth a few years ago, thanks to James Loewen's eye-popping book, Lie My Teacher Told Me. When I repeated Loewen's lessons about Columbus to one of my traveling companions after that walking tour, she was completely surprised, despite being a successful, intelligent, well-educated attorney. And as Loewen says, and I myself have said since reading his book, don't get me started on Woodrow Wilson.

Lies Across America does for public historical markers and monuments what Lies My Teacher Told Me did for high school history texts -- expose the distortions, inaccuracies, omissions, back-patting, propaganda, and outright lies that appear across the American landscape, posing as history. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming number of examples deal with the historical treatment of Native Americans in the West and Northeast, and with African Americans in the South.

Originally published in 1999, Loewen has cause to issue this revised version: the 2017 Charlottesville demonstrations, which started in response to the removal of a Confederate momument. That catalyzed changes in public history that Loewen had been advocating over the past two decades, particularly with respect to the Confederacy and race relations. Tentative though those changes may be, to date, it is heartening to see some movement toward correcting the public record, changes significant enough to warrant an update to Loewen's record of inaccuracies.

One of the interesting aspects of Loewen's analysis that may not at first be obvious is that these distortions in the public sphere may say as much about when they were erected as they do about the historical period they pretend to document. Mainly, this means that the rewriting of the history of the Confederacy, Civil War, slavery, and race relations is more of a reflection of the resurgence of institutional racism in the early 20th century than anything else. And what is happening now in the wake of Charlottesville is a repudiation of that unfortunate legacy.

The book is not really organized for a straight reading. After a few introductory chapters, Loewen travels through all 50 states from west to east visiting individual sites and examining the veracity of some of their public historical markers, telling the real stories behind them. Having gotten an advance copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, I read them all from start to finish. But most people will probably want to pick and choose which entries to read based on their personal interest.

This subject matter may be a tough pill for many Americans to swallow, as was the case with Lies My Teacher Told Me. It directly challenges the popular vision of America and its history. I for one believe that, for all the greatness this nation has achieved, undeniably, there are also a number of unpleasant truths that have been swept under the rug. Like I said to the Aussie in Barcelona, I believe that people want to know the truth. James Loewen is a historian devoted to telling the unadulterated truth, and I commend him for it. He should be required reading.

This is not a review, it is a comment.
I am reading this using Kindle for iPhone. I have found ‘cut and paste’ errors in the first several introductory essays where paragraphs were out of order. I hope this is an artifact of reading in Kindle, but it is discouraging me from continuing to read the book.
I am giving it a three star rating as being ‘neutral’ since I am required to include a star review even though I am not reviewing the book at this time.

As a high school social studies teacher, I am very familiar with James W. Loewen and his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. After reading that book, I felt challenged and was forced to take a closer look at my course content and whether I was teaching my students to analyze (not just memorize) the past. When I discovered the revised edition of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, I was reminded of why I enjoy Loewen’s mix of history, social perspective, and no-nonsense writing style. In this updated edition, Loewen examines historic sites and monuments in our country at a time when lack of representation is being questioned. Loewen prefaces the book with short essays examining America’s past and how that history has been memorialized. He includes over 90 national historic locations, ranging from well-known (think Denali/Mt. McKinley) to those that you did not know existed, such as a memorial to George Washington (not the one you are thinking of). Regardless of your background on each location, you will turn the page with new understandings and questions to ponder. Loewen prompts the reader to differentiate between what should be remembered versus what should be honored.

Picking apart historical sites across the nation, the update of Loewen's book has plenty of oomph--you could also argue that it's just now getting started, too. The past two decades have been kind to it, allowing him to insert updates to each entry, and delivering news in the positive direction, for the most part.

The book's piercing stare at our nation's habit of misrepresenting, omitting, or outright lying about historical points of interest can definitely stoke the coals of one's cynicism, but the afore-mentioned updates, as well as information as to how to approach each historical area with the correct mindset, gives Loewen's work must-read status.

Rife with opportunities to allow ourselves to sober up and move past the atrocities of yesterday, LIES is a markedly masterful tour to reveal just how porcelain and hollow our beloved institutions can be, but more importantly, it's potentially an answer key on how to get on the right track.

Many thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for the advance read.

Having read the original edition of this book, I was excited to see a new edition coming out, especially after so many Confederate monuments have been removed and the US has done a bit of introspection on how we should portray our country's past. Mr. Loewen has added more depictions of our history which are either misleading or avoided as much as possible. Very glad to have read this & I will definitely share it with my 19 year old son.

Lies Across America is a interesting and informative book. The book is well written. The book will make you think twice about the monuments you may see.

Was Sie über Amerika wissen, können Sie in großen Teilen vergessen: interessant, was sich im In- und Ausland an Geschichten manifestiert hat durch Bücher oder Filme usw.
Der Autor macht deutlich, wie sehr die amerikanische Geschichte geschönt wurde und dass dies ein Ende haben muss, gerade vor dem Hintergrund, dass die USA dem Ausland gern ihre Fehler vorwirft, da man sich der eigenen Verfehlungen oftmals nicht bewusst ist. Dies wird wissentlich in Kauf genommen durch Fehlinformationen in Lehrbüchern und Touristeninformationen.

I had read the first edition of this back in 2003. I was excited to dive back in and see how much has changed. I felt that the author had done a splendid job with detailing misrepresentations across America in regards to historical monuments and signs.
The updates were also quite good. I just wish that there wasn't so much focus on the civil war. I would have loved to hear about different markers and monuments. To me, I grew bored and weary of the same civil war misinformation that he presented.
Overall, it makes you think about what a historical marker is saying and NOT saying.