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• ISBN13: 9781595230560
• Condition: New
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Larry Schweikart | | Paperback:
| 336 pages | | Publisher:
| Sentinel Trade | | Publication Date:
| August 25, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1595230564 | | Package Length:
| 8.3 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.75 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 75 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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3 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Not in my schoolingJul 31, 2010
The supposed things that this author is saying are taught in school certainly weren't when I was in school (over 40 years ago), nor were they taught in my son's schools. My DIL says that they are not taught these things in my Grandchildren's schools, either.
While having the facts set out is a good thing. Pretending that the facts were not taught, and that he is trying to set the record straight, is less than honest.
My advice is to read an actual history book. Don't let people like this tell you what is being taught when it is not.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Score: Schweikart- 48, Liberals- 0Jul 24, 2010
Its amazing to see the ridiculous comments from people who are clearly conspiracy theorist liberals themselves trying to argue this, yet not one gave any specifics or facts. Many of these do seem like conspiracy theories, but little do the liberals know is that they actually originated from liberals! 9/11 truther movement came from the left, not the right, and the only reason it in the book, as the author stated, is that it was in far-left director Oliver Stone's movie.
In all seriousness, there were many lies in here that I had learned in school, at least half of them. Many critics claim they never heard these "conspiracies" in school, which is why the title is "that you PROBABLY learned in school" not "that you DEFINTELY learned in school."
One example that the critics don't seem to like is that one lie says Jefferson favored small government and was a pacifist. If any of the critics bothered to read this lie, they would know Schweikart states Jefferson did favor small government in most cases, and this chapter is mostly dedicated to disproving Jefferson being a pacifist.
The critics obviously didn't bother to read this book thoroughly, or maybe even at all. Schweikart sets the record straight and gives us a true look at some of the lies our youth is being taught in schools. He pulls examples from many of the mainstream textbooks used in class rooms. A must have for anyone with an open mind and not indocrinated by liberalism.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Great Corrective!Jul 18, 2010
Great book! It's refreshing to read a history that isn't always bashing a)the U.S. Government or b) the American people (and capitalism in general). I've heard most of the these lies over the last several years and in many books (a few of which the author mentions) and seeing them handily refuted in print is very nice. It is a go-to reference book for information on many issues.
Some of the better lies exposed include:
- FDR knew about Pearl Harbor
- Truman used the a-bombs on Japan to intimidate the soviets.
- Nixon expanded the Vietnam War.
- Sept. 11th was a government conspiracy.
- Columbus killed millions of Indians.
- Mainstream news is fair and balanced.
- High School history books are not biased
Highly Recommended.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
It is about time someone wrote this book!Jul 12, 2010
As a lifetime history teacher I heartily endorse this book. It is the perfect counterpoint to such best selling drivel as Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. I have spent my teaching career battling revisionism in American History. I think that it a destructive force which teaches our children to hate their own country. I believe what Churchill said about revealing history "warts and all", but I have seen a self-destructive spiral in US History instruction where ALL wars are wrong, ALL presidents have underhanded, ulterior motives for their actions, and America can do nothing but wrong. I never excluded or tried to cover up our mistakes and faults, but I didn't dwell on the negative aspects of our history so much that I turned my students into unpatriotic cynics. I always taught my students to respect all viewpoints and feel that teachers who try to indoctrinate students to their political views are unprofessional and abuse their authority. I despise the political correctness movement and what it has done to history education. We are so obsessed with using the right labels and not offending anyone, that we have watered down history books to the point of making them uninteresting. This book does a great job of debunking the prevailing myths that are taught in many history classrooms today. I only wish that it went into more detail and provided more scholarly documentation for those of us who are so inclined.
5 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 A resentful polemic against phantomsJul 07, 2010
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, 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.
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