I usually struggle with non fiction, but this book is so well written and easy to read. Filled with lots of facts that most people aren’t taught in school. It’s the true history of the US, and the title is perfect for what it reveals to the reader: the multitude of white lies we were taught about slavery in school to make it “palatable.”

As a raised Southerner, I found this to be so deeply relatable to my experience learning and reconciling the history of the Civil War and how it is twisted by the southern narrative. Although the intended audience for this book is teen/young adults, I found it suitable for adult readers as well.

White lies is well written, engaging and brings information to light that needs to be read. While I was aware of the Lost Cause as a concept, and knew it was fictional, understanding that it was conciously and purposely constructed is a different thing entirely. The author systematically addresses each lie, the details that created the fabrication, the reasons it was created and the damage done by its retelling. The catalog of statues and memorials brings the information firmly into the present day throughout the text.

I grew up (and still live) in Florida. I was educated in the public school system, and have vivid memories of history lessons that romanticized the Confederacy. The Confederate battle flag still flies in places in my hometown. I see it less often today than I did in earlier decades, though. If I stand outside and throw a rock, I’ll very likely hit someone who believes the Civil War was about states rights.

All that to say that I went into this book already a believer in Bausum’s premise. I figured I’d probably be familiar with a lot of the propaganda in the book and probably not surprised by much. While I’d heard some of the information before, there were still some shocking revelations.

I really appreciate that Bausam covers the shifting perceptions about the American Civil War from wartime to 2023. Following the thread of history helped me connect the dots between historical events in ways that I was unsuccessful at before. For example, the text covers the shift in how Confederate graves are maintained/honored at Arlington National Cemetery, especially under the direction of U.S. presidents.

The book also highlights various Confederate statues and monuments. Brief acts about the monument’s creation, its location, and current status appear on a page with an image showing the statue or monument. Learning about those was interesting, too.

This is a long book. I wish there were more photographs or other formatting to visually break up the text. However, Bausum’s arguments are carefully constructed. There’s no rushing to any conclusions here. The backmatter is pretty extensive and includes a long list of sources, research notes, an author’s note, a timeline, and an index.

Overall, this is an incredibly helpful resource. I realized after I finished reading this that another of Bausum’s books (The Bard and the Book: How the First Folio Saved the Plays of William Shakespeare from Oblivion) is already on my reading list. I’ve added a few of her other titles about the Civil Rights movement to my reading list as well.

An unflinching and well-crafted portrayal of the manipulation of history surrounding the Civil War and the culture that was birthed from those lies. Ann Bausum's White Lies is a deeply affecting account of how the myth of the Lost Cause wove its way into not just southern, but national recounts of The War of the Rebellion. This is a wonderful supplementary text for American History classrooms as well as guide to understanding how American culture and beliefs have been shaped into what they are today.

Bausum confronts each of the lies that have been spun from the close of the Civil War and unravels each one with meticulous precision. She holds up a mirror for the American people to see clearly the mindset and methods used to help push these false narratives into widely held beliefs that are still reinforced through education, memorials, and entertainment today. The in-depth research provided allows readers to follow the complicated threads that were woven by former confederate leaders and their supporters to maintain power over their states and the way history remembers them.

This is a bleak book that can feel overwhelming at times, but an important addition to the collection of texts that refuse to allow revisionist history to continue promoting the justification of oppression and systemic racism. This is a must read for all Americans as well as those wishing to gain to better understanding of the American South and its influence over American culture.

White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History by Ann Bausum

I received an uncorrected proof from Roaring Brook Press in advance via Netgalley with the expectation, but not requirement, that I write the review. The opinions are my own.

As I write this, the category for the book on Amazon is “Teen & Young Adult,” but that is definitely not the audience– it’s at least on a college reading level. As the author writes, it’s her own attempt to “lance the wounds” of her childhood. The book is meticulously researched with almost 600 footnotes/references that make up 20 percent of the text. There are many historical concepts that a 12 year old hasn’t been exposed to yet. I hope the publisher is able to get the category changed to appeal to a wider and more appropriate audience.

I grew up in Kentucky and was never required to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, learning only later in life that the book takes place in Kentucky. My grandmother, from Texas, set aside time every year – skipping church, mind you – to watch Gone With the Wind with her friends when it was broadcast in its entirety by TNT or some other channel. I’m also a descendant of slavers and have the discomfort of reading between the lines in their property transactions in doing genealogical research. I can remember spending most of the 8th grade studying the Civil War – when the movie Gettysburg was coincidentally in theaters and we all swallowed the “We should have freed the slaves and then fired on Ft. Sumter” as historically accurate. My history teacher – who was Black – seemed likewise to have no qualms with the “it was all about states’ rights” myth. If you have similar memories, this book is for you.

This is a book we need to read, like taking medicine that is unpleasant but you know will make you healthier. Even though I grew up in the South, have loved studying history my whole life, and thought I knew more than I did. As I found it difficult, I decided that it’s essentially like reading about any cult – the deeper the lie goes, the more angry you feel. It’s also hard to read about the bipartisan support in Congress for eliminating Confederate monuments and renaming bases– overriding a presidential veto– only to recently see that reversed by executive order in 2025 without a peep from congress or much of the media. This makes the book even more important.

Bausum examines 20 different myths that still surface from time-to-time in people’s conversations, on message boards, in a speech or an article. Some of those myths were printed as fact in history books, so people vaguely remembering them from childhood shouldn’t be seen as unusual. Most myths became accepted after the generation that had witnessed slavery and the War of the Rebellion had long passed away. In most cases, they were purposefully resurrected during the 1960s and 1970s as southern states strongly objected to federal civil rights legislation and federal court orders ending segregation.

I could complain about the density of the book, the author overly-explores the details of a few characters and many statues and monuments where perhaps only a few pages would have sufficed to make room for content she did not include, but I will definitely keep it as a reference. I’ll be reading some of the books she references, such as W.E.B Dubois’ work on Reconstruction and the introspection of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin.

There are many things I wish she’d included. Joseph J. Ellis’ recent book The Cause reminded me that none of the Founding Fathers from the South ever argued that slavery was compatible with the Declaration of Independence, thus undermining the Lost Cause claim that they were on the side of the Founders. She doesn’t mention much about the counties in the South – even as far as Alabama – that sent volunteers to the Union cause, and how the commonality in all those places was the lack of slaves. That also helps undermine the “it was all about states’ rights” myth.

Reading Bausum's work, I also wanted to hear the anecdotes and perspective of the historians from the “Dunning School” of thought she was critiquing and other perspectives, particularly on the Reconstruction– which I don’t think was covered well in my history courses. I happened to be reading a history of a North Carolina county from the 1970s written by the late William S. Powell, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill. This was a county that was left with a larger free Black population than White after the Civil War. While Powell states outright that the secession was about slavery, his Black History chapter contains specific anecdotes the author holds up as an example of the “filiality” of the relationship between slaves and owners without mentioning the absolute forced and unequal nature of the relationship. He recounts an 1861 local newspaper story about “a free man of color” who donated to the Confederate cause immediately after hearing North Carolina had seceded, with the article suggesting they could easily raise eager Black troops from the county’s slaves as an example of the spirit of the times. Powell’s Reconstruction portions talk of how Black Republican delegates elected to the NC General Assembly spent time giving speeches with vulgar language and apparently bringing shame to the offices they held, for which the white population was apparently justified in using Jim Crow methods to keep them out of office henceforth. I think Bausum could have spent more time pushing back on any number of specific anecdotal stories which you can find all over the South.

I recently visited the land in which my ancestors lived with their farms, a still very rural area in North Carolina. As I drove the backroads, I saw from the many flags and banners that there was clearly still an active Klan presence, which prompted me to want to study deeper why people still proudly cling to the “Lost Cause,” not knowing that the term itself was invented and intentionally perpetuated after the war as part of the propaganda. I started reading Bausum’s book immediately after the trip. The author doesn’t delve into the psychology of the why, but she covers the how very well. The magnitude of Daughters of the Confederacy as an eager propaganda arm – with their own catechism(!) – and the volume of people who consumed Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind whole cloth, how even U.S. presidents sanctioned monuments in hallowed federal land not even 50 years after the Civil War.

Based on my reading of her book, I reached my own conclusion that the people of the South felt a deep need to feel secure in their status as Whites and their own historical identities. (Indeed a couple people in the book fall into this category explicitly, without the author making it plain.) Many of the people living in my county of origin with my last name now are Black, living on land once owned by slaveholders by the same name, and their histories are sadly largely unrecorded– genealogy is largely a White record. But in their wildly popular effort to make themselves feel better, they succeeded wildly in indoctrinating generations and convincing the North that the South wasn’t so bad after all. I’m thankful for Bausum’s work to help inoculate us from the lies we learned as children, and to help us think critically and seek what we can find from the perspectives of those who lived through it– especially the largely ignored or unwritten histories of African Americans. Five stars.

White Lies should be required reading for all teens (and a lot of adults)! It pulls no punches in getting to the bottom of Racism in America. Deconstructing, debunking, and decoding the lies and alternate histories that have been constructed to perpetuate racism - one lie at a time.

With a time line starting before the War of the Rebellion, and continuing on to present times, this book takes a hard look at the truths that have been buried, and the consequences of that burial. By thoroughly examining the Lost Cause and its impacts, White Lies shows the reader how a lot of small decisions and events ultimately cause an avalanche of consequences. This same power can be used for good though; by learning about the truth and actual history - imagine how much better the world could be in just a generation or two.

This highly readable and relatable history book explores how the mythology of the South’s “Lost Cause,” which recasts the Confederate rebels as patriots and heroes, eclipsed the actual story of the historical events that led up to and propelled the Civil War to its conclusion and aftermath and became the dominant perspective—despite its foundations in fiction and face-saving revisionism.

Chapters in this thoroughly researched history (the notes, bibliography, timeline are exacting) are accompanied by what Bausum labels the twenty foundational lies told by white supremacists that undergird the romanticized Lost Cause, e.g., the Confederate flag is a symbol of southern honor, slavery benefited both the enslaver and those he enslaved, or the Civil War was only about states’ rights, not slavery.

Bausum dispassionately highlights how these lies wormed their way into movies and popular literary, academia, and the military, and were codified in legislation (Jim Crow laws in particular, but also with regard to voting, which persists to this day) in order to whitewash the brutality and cruelty of slavery and allow Southerners who clung to this morally-suspect way of life to save face in the wake of their crushing defeat by the Army of the Potomac. And all of this twisting of the truth seemed to allow Southerners to insist that, even though may have been defeated on the battlefield, they held the moral high ground, setting the stage for the ongoing systemic oppression of Black Americans by an unapologetically racist society.

I just hope that in the current political climate this important book still gets it due attention. Should be required reading.

Confronting history is always a good idea. Bausum has written many books for that purpose and especially focuses on confronting history for young people, however, this will be a hard one for teens to get through because it is dense material. I'm reading an advanced copy of the book digitally, so I am hoping some of my issues in reading the book relate to it's unfocused pagination digitally however there are only a few spreads of images and some text (like the statue information) wasn't formatted in a way that popped from the page. So I will reserve judgement until I see the final, finished copy in print form, because it has to be visually stimulating for a teen audience or the content will just rot on the vine.

It's information is as up to date as it can be when it comes to how the United States is taking a look at statues, commemorations to the Civil War, and art and advertisements. Bausum interrogates the learning and unlearning that needs to occur to better understand "how the south lost the Civil War, then rewrote history" which is a task worthy of her caliber of writing and thoughtfulness but the execution in this format doesn't do the information justice because it reads more dryly than most teens will have tolerance for.

White Lies uncovers the history of the south during and after the Civil War and how a lot of people try to change and cover up history. It also ties these themes into more current events like the removal of monuments and rise of white supremacy.

I think I have an unpopular opinion. The information in this book was well researched and interesting. I had so much difficultly with the format of the book. Part of it could have been the eARC formatting not being close to what the finished book would actually be like. But my main issue was the format of the 20 lies Bausum debunks. To me, it felt like the lies showed up randomly and were not separate chapters. When the lies showed up, I also felt like she spent most of the section talking about somewhat related background information and only a couple of paragraphs debunking the lie. Again. this could have been the formatting in the eARC or the fact that it took me almost 20 days to read this book. I also felt like the topics would jump around in sections and I was confused.

I still plan on purchasing this for my library and look forward to seeing what the finished book looks like.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

If you want to see how calculated propaganda attempts to rewrite history, read this book. I grew up in the south and have heard, and even believed when I was younger, some of these lies surrounding The War of Rebellion (aka The Civil War). This book expertly unravels those deceptions, provides accurate history, and shows how easy it is for people to twist narratives to suit their own position. Two thumbs up - a must read.

Well it’s full of the truth buttttt towards the end veered off somewhat in blaming a certain president for being racially biased and I don’t believe that is true. But most of this is historically true. Most doesn’t know this truth and are still believing the lies, but This is a true account of how the lies came about and were spread.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Childrens Publishing for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

How many people love the movie Gone with the Wind? I didn’t see it until I was in college, but even back then I was wondering how a story about the glorification of the rebels could be so popular. Then I found out that the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. What?! As I began to explore movie history, there was a silent film called Birth of a Nation that was a HUGE film when it was released in 1915. It got a screening in Woodrow Wilson’s White House (he was born in the Confederate south and segregated the federal government following decades of progress, leaving thousands of upwardly mobile Blacks without jobs.)

Ann Bausum, a Wisconsin author who grew up in Virginia, has taken to task the idea of The Lost Cause that has been so pervasive in parts of our country. And whoa, just whoa! This young adult history book should be required reading for young and old alike. Bausum systematically breaks down how millions of Americans have learned a whitewashed version of events surrounding the War of Rebellion, known to many as the Civil War. How confederate soldiers have received more than 2,000 memorials across the south, and how a few southern groups have reframed the Rebellion as The Lost Cause and romanticized their secession from the United States.

Both the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised tons of money for confederate monuments and to infiltrate everything from newspapers to school textbooks. As late as the 1980s, Virginia textbooks were repeating the lies the Daughters of the Confederacy had crafted. There are literally several generations of southerners who are still alive that were fed the propaganda of The Lost Cause and have to unlearn it.

The mythology that the War of Rebellion was about states’ rights was complete and utter bull shit. It was always about the “peculiar institution” of slavery. It was ALWAYS about keeping the Blacks in bondage. It was always about “plantation politics” (control in Congress), where Blacks were counted as 3/5 of a person and therefore gave the southern elected officials more power in the legislature. It was always about white supremacy.

Also deconstructed in this book is the Confederate Battle Flag, which is not the official flag of the confederate states, but rather a battle flag for a specific group of soldiers. Those who still wave the flag, which includes several southern state capitals, claim that this flag simply is for “southern honor.” I call bull shit again. It’s always about white supremacy.

The book also covers the efforts of the Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement, leading up to today, when the Felon of the United States actually said that “there’s good people on both sides” following a 2015 massacre in a Charlottesville, S.C. church that was done by a white supremacist. His social media profile showed him posing with the Confederate Battle Flag and his guns.

I highlighted so much in this book because there was so much unbelievable content! Like the fact that General Nathan Bedford Forest has several monuments and memorials to him across the south. The dude was the founding father of the KKK! Yet modern southerners don’t understand why society as a whole wants these confederate monuments taken down. Simply having statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still divides this country. These men and many more weren’t heroes; they were traitors and there should be no veneration of them in the 21st century.

One of my many highlighted sections was the year 2008, when the U.S. Census Bureau stated that by the year 2050, the white population in the United States would be less than 50%, with the rest of the population combined would make up more than half the country. That was the year that saw the rise of the Tea Party, a more radically conservative part of the Republican Party that eventually took over. That was also the year that we as a national electorate picked a Black man as President. Things have been slowly getting worse in our country ever since.

Insightful and necessary. While this is geared towards a younger audience, its information is relevant to any age. This would be great in a classroom.

📱Thank you NetGalley for the ARC e-book of White Lies. This book was fantastic and I couldn’t keep myself from info-dumping the facts I learned to everyone I know. This book is geared towards teenagers and young adults to absorb an accessible history of the civil war that is a strong departure from most history textbooks in school.

First of all, the author is a white woman who grew up in Virginia but has since moved up north. The most fascinating part of the book (in my opinion) is she grew up learning the white lies of the civil war in her history textbooks in the 60s and 70s. She was literally brainwashed on confederate propaganda as a child and had to unlearn the history as an adult. I find this aspect of the book so profound because it shows that people can change and unlearn white supremacy viewpoints. She wrote this book as an effort to help people like herself do the work of unlearning harmful lies.

Secondly, although I knew a correct history of the civil war (I grew up on textbooks in the 90s in the north that didn’t whitewash the civil war or the horrors of slavery), I had no idea the extent of the propaganda spread throughout the south to whitewash the war and rewrite the narrative as pro-confederate. I knew about the Daughters of the Confederacy and how they built monuments to confederate soldiers but I had no idea how deep they went. They essentially created a brainwashing children’s club to teach the white supremacist lies to young children (in a similar way to Hitler Youth) and they rewrote history textbooks and put them in southern classrooms that lasted all the way until the early 1970s. These textbooks were filled with lies and explicitly white supremacist.

Thirdly, I had no idea how many U.S. presidents decided to honor Confederate soldiers. Like what the heck? Why would a northern U.S. president decide to honor the graves of confederate soldiers? Why did we not treat the confederate soldiers like the traitors they were? It’s wild to me how many presidents succumbed to the white lies the south worked so hard to spread.

This book is easy to read and thorough. It walks through over 20 “white lies” that the south perpetuated for over a century and it tells the true history of what really happened - from before the war, to the war, to reconstruction, and beyond. I highly recommend this book to all ages. Maybe 8th grade and above? I’m not a teacher but I feel like an 8th grader should be able to understand this history and have the reading comprehension for a book of this caliber.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.
White Lies is an eye-opening examination of Civil War mythology that I found deeply thought-provoking. As someone from the South, I've grown up with a particular narrative about the Civil War, and Bausum's book challenged much of what I thought I knew.
The author's approach is both clever and effective—she presents 20 commonly accepted "truths" about the Civil War and then systematically dismantles them using solid historical research and evidence. This structure makes the book accessible and engaging, even for someone like me who doesn't typically read a lot of nonfiction.
This book is valuable for readers who, like me, may have learned a "slanted narrative" about this pivotal period in American history. It's a reminder that history is often more complex and nuanced than the stories we're told, and that questioning what we think we know can lead to a deeper understanding.

In this book, the author's thesis is to dispel the twenty biggest Lost Cause myths.. Thoroughly researched, and she gives reasons why the lost cause myths seem to still permeate throughout the United States. Politicians and the Daughters of the Confederacy rely on the Lost Cause to justify white supremacy and their superiority over other races. With the use of statues, movies, books, and even history curriculum, they promote an idealized picture of the antebellum South and the rebel, Confederate fighters as benevolent, chivalrous men whose aim is to maintain this ideological lifestyle. During the reconstruction period and beyond, they portray the KKK as men who help their neighbors and protect women from the evil boogeyman. She also highlights recent events used to dispel the lost cause myth, through the tearing down of monuments and the renaming of bases.

Ms. Buam presents her argument in an approachable manner for middle-grade readers. She effectively disproves the fallacies. I recommend it to people who want the unfiltered truth about American history with all its good, bad, and ugly truths.

White Lies is fantastic investigation into the mythology of the Lost Cause, the lies told as part of the myth, and the pervasiveness of these lies. In tracing the origins of the Lost Cause and explaining how the myth has perpetuated for generations, Bausum shows how the end of the War of Rebellion links to much of our current issues around racial (in)justice. While this is written for a YA audience, I would urge adults to read this, too.

Took me a long time to get through this book because it wasn’t the light fluff I wanted at this point in my life, but that’s nothing against the book itself. I kept opening it back up, and I learned so much about American history and about Southern history. I had heard of the “Lost Cause,” but didn’t really know what was meant by the term. It turns out that some of what I had understood as true about the Civil War (War of the Rebellion!) was actually from propaganda—even down to the name of the conflict!
Theoretically this is a book for young readers but I thought it was perfectly appropriate for adults. I actually recommended it to a DEI book group of which I’m a part. Highly recommend to anyone who reads nonfiction.

White Lies may be marketed as a children’s book, but it provides a very thorough examination of its core topic. I learned a lot through reading it, and I have a pretty strong understanding of America’s ugly past.

For example, as a white woman who grew up in the Midwest in the 1980s, I never realized that the “Mammy” stereotype didn’t even come from anything real. So, it was abhorrent and 100% wrong, but I used to think it was only abhorrent. This helps highlight just how insidious the ‘Lost Cause’ was and still is.

This book disgusted me several times, and it brought up yet again how much white ‘supremacy’ ruins everything. Much recommended, although you should expect to be outraged.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC. This review contains my honest, unbiased opinion.