| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lies across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. By James W. Loewen. (New York: New Press, 1999. 471 pp. $26.95, ISBN 1-56584-344-4.)

James W. Loewen turns his curmudgeonly eye to the strategies Americans use to commemorate the nation's past—or some imagined version of it—on the varied memorial landscape. There are several amusing entries. A marker in Almo, Idaho, commemorates an Indian massacre that never took place. And there are monuments inspired by boosterism: towns boasting of being the birthplace of the first car, the first flight, the first use of ether. 1

Our landscape tells many lies, Loewen argues, through silence (the failure of Scottsboro, Alabama, to recall the Scottsboro cases), omission (the use of the term "servant," not "slave," at many historic homes), sanitization (particularly at war museums), and overemphasis (the overwhelming memorial presence of governments, United States and Confederate, and in particular their wars). 2

He calls attention to the importance of naming and renaming. For those contemptuous of Native American attempts to rename Devil's Lake, he argues, "If non-Native Americans no longer believe that Native religions are the devil's work, it is time to remove that implication from names all across America." . . .

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