Another great exploration book is Down the Great Unknown, by Edward Dolnick. It’s the story of the first successful trip down the Colorado River by John Wesley Powell and his crew.
Benjamin Franklin, by Isaacson is an excellent narrative about the man and his times and the lead up to the Revolutionary War.
I can tell you what occasioned me checking out his footnotes.
Loewen has a thesis in Lies Across America that Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest is overly honored in the South (with statues and markers and things named for him), and that the true reason he is honored is not for his military accomplishments but because he was an early leader of the original KKK.
The problem comes in when Loewen begins to stretch and distort the facts to fit his thesis. I don’t have the book in front of me but my recollection is that he describes Forrest as a minor general of no great accomplishment. (In fact, generals on both sides describe Forrest as one of the greatest military geniuses the war produced, and perhaps the greatest cavalry leader in the war. Loewen doesn’t tell his readers this.)
In support of his thesis that Forrest is overly honored he mentions a town named for him in Arkansas. (He doesn’t tell his readers that Forrest founded the town.)
He mentions a monument to Forrest in Rome, Georgia, again implying that it is there because of Forrest’s KKK connections. (He doesn’t tell his readers that Forrest headed off a Union force and prevented Rome from being sacked.)
There were several other similar examples.
I checked some of Loewen’s footnotes describing Forrest’s evil deeds during the war. Those footnotes didn’t check out.
That led me to check some of Lowen’s other footnotes. I found that his footnotes often were faulty. The sources often didn’t support the points for which Loewen cited them. Was it laziness? Error? Intentional deception? I don’t know. But I do know you can’t trust what Loewen tells you.
Fighting Lies With Lies might be a good title for his next book.
I am not surprised to hear that Loewen distorts facts to make his points. He’s clearly obsessed with racism and it ruins what could be good books.
To get off the Loewen tangent, I highly, highly recommend Alan Taylor’s American Colonies. Besides being interesting history, it’s very engagingly written, to the extent that I didn’t want to put it down and was sad when I finished it.
Since your friend is interested in the Supreme Court, I’ll add a recommendation for Peter Irons’ A People’s History of the Supreme Court, which tells the stories of some of the most important Supreme Court cases. It tends to focus on civil rights issues, in particular, and is well-written and interesting.
For sports history Seabiscuit is very good (the movie is top notch too)
If you want American historical novels – that are not all battles-and-action – I recomment Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and The Golden Age. (The last goes only as far as about 1950; I hope Vidal lives long enough to bring the series up to date.)
Another good recommendation of this sort is the Jeff Shaara trilogy about WWII. While they are considered novels (because of attributed thoughts and dialog), the settings, events and people are completely factual.
I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History many years ago and it… annoyed me. He goes out of his way to turn black into white and up into down. With few exceptions, every Indian is noble, every settler is evil, every businessman is a ruthless tycoon, every labor leader is a doomed hero and every soldier is a murderous thug. Blech.
Several of these are Pulitzer winners, and richly deserved to be:
Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers - A great look at the Framers of the Constitution and their relationships - sometimes friendly, sometimes not, always competitive - with each other.
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg - Disassembles and explains the Gettysburg Address - literate, classy and insightful.
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom - One of the best one-volume histories of the Civil War out there, IMHO.
Geoffrey Ward et al., The Civil War - Ditto.
David McCullough, Truman - A great bio of a long-underappreciated leader.
James Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man - Also a great bio. Read this to see just why Washington was so vital to the cause of American independence, and then practically invented the Presidency.
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton - A magnificent, highly readable profile of the brilliant but deeply flawed man who did more than anyone else to lay the groundwork for generations of American prosperity.
Believe it or not, I’m going to suggest a text book: David M. Kennedy’s The American Pageant, which is the one most often used in colleges. It’s now in its 13th edition and goes beyond being a dry recitation of facts, explaining events and why they were noteworthy.
Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (of This American Life and The Incredibles fame). It delves into the group of Puritans led by John Winthrop (of the “shining city on a hill” fame.) Fascinating history and highly entertaining.
And a good followup would be Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, by Eric Foner.
Never read Lies Across America, but I still value Lies My Teacher Told Me because it taught me some rather incontrovertible things I had not known of, or at least not fully appreciated, before – e.g., that practically all American Indian nations who came in contact with Old Worlders were immediately devastated by new (to them) contagious diseases – and that the process continues even today along the line-of-first-contact, e.g., in the Amazon jungles; or that the history of black-white relations in America has not been a slow but more or less steady progress from slavery to equality, but went through a lot of setbacks, and reached a nadir of hostility and exclusion in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. You won’t find much mention of those things in The American Pageant. (At least, not the edition used when I was in high school.)
Certainly every real history book of the last 40 years and probably of the last 50 years will contain this narrative. I don’t know how old your textbook was, but there have been numerous complaints that today’s textbooks overemphasize this narrative as opposed to saluting American heroes. I’ve never read a modern textbook so I can only report what I’ve read. To be sure, I don’t think you can overemphasize these crimes but I also am awed by the special nature of America as the world’s great democracy and home to immigrants. It’s an interesting line to walk. However, what it means is that you absolutely don’t need Loewen to get any of this story.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann contains a lengthy look at the effects of disease on the native populations of the Americas. (Despite the title, virtually the entire book is about the post-Columbus era.)
A good book, I agree, although it contains enough controversial material to fill several journals. It’s surprising how many genuine scholars dismiss the notion that disease may have caused the downfall of Native American civilizations, despite much evidence of it at least being a major contributor.
Yes, yes. But it’s still a useful corrective to the more conventional and equally false picture you’ll get in history classes and in most mass-media narratives.
Whereas crap like the RW’s purported answer to it, A Patriot’s History of the United States, is not a useful corrective to anything at all.
I took a quick look at the comments on Amazon and each of them seemed to have some variation on “the Marxist garbage by Howard Zinn that is so favored by the academic community.”
Does the right really believe this? I’ve read literally hundreds of books on history and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen Zinn used as a reference. I know a couple of people here have mentioned him but I just assumed he’s one of those nutty cult authors. No historian takes him seriously that I’m aware of. Or is it just that I’m ignorant of what campus life is like today. How many professors are worshiping Zinn? Or is he just another book out of many?
A People’s History first appeared in 1980. There might have need a need for a “corrective to the more conventional and equally false picture you’ll get in history classes and in most mass-media narratives” in 1980, but that was three decades ago. The entire academic establishment has been correcting that picture since.
Since when? Seemingly every movie and television drama since the mid-60s has embraced the “Noble Savage” narrative of Native American history.
To say nothing of Avatar!
When I read A People’s History back in my 20s I thought it an eye-opener because I didn’t know about things like the Haymarket Square riots or the unrest in New York during the American Civil War. Later, I realized that these events are covered in lots of books, just not made central events… unless of course, the source is about them.
I don’t know about academics but I have run into people who extol APHotUSA and recommend it to everybody. For instance, it’s available online and there’s a blurb on the cover page that includes this line: “In fact, years ago, we would offer people twenty dollars if they read the book and didn’t think it was completely worth their time.” Too bad that offer isn’t still going. It’d be an easy twenty bucks for a lot of people.
Anyway, here’s the link. I’m not sure if it was posted with the author’s permission or not, and it doesn’t include any copyright info that I saw in a quick look, so if I’m doing wrong by posting it, I’m sorry.
I’m trying to think of some really good books on American history but all I’m coming up with are some recent good reads.
Ike: An American Hero, which is more balanced than the title implies.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which I started reading because I’m interested in H H Munroe, the guy often billed as America’s first serial killer, but the parts about the Chicago exhibition turned out to be more interesting.
Looking at my bookshelf, well, there’s Flashman and the Redskins, which is good if you like Flashman. Which you should, you know.
It might be better to recommend authors. David McCullough is good. James M. McPherson is too, but focused on the ACW.