Product Description

The truth and nothing but the truth--Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends:

• The story of Columbus discovered that the world was round was invented by Washington Irving.

• The pilgrims never lived in log cabins.

• In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock.

• Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell in love with his best friend's wife.

• Independence wasn't declared on July 4 (and the Liberty Bell was so little regarded that Philadelphia tried to sell it for scrap metal but nobody wanted it).

• After World War II, the U.S. Government concluded that Japan would have surrendered within months, even if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87600 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-03
• Released on: 1992-06-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This entertaining look at the myths Americans live by debunks everything from the sanctity of the Founding Fathers to the notion that concern for defendants' rights is a recent development. Shenkman, coauthor of One Night Stands with American History , begins with our presidents and disabuses readers of the idea that poor boys can grow up to occupy the White House (there have been few). He goes on to a multitude of subjects, including sex, war, the frontier, education, art, pointing out along the way that prostitution flourished in the Victorian era, that the defenders of the Alamo did not all perish in the battle and that in the antebellum South not all whites backed slavery. The book is occasionally eye-opening and always fun.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Facts go only skin-deep, but they can prickle memorably, which is why books like this, disabusing us of our cherished bunk, are useful and fun." -- New York Times Book Review

About the Author
Richard Shenkman is the New York Times bestselling author of five history books, including Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History, "I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not," and One-Night Stands with American History, which he co-authored. Educated at Vassar and Harvard, he is an Emmy Award-winning investigator reporter and the former managing editor of the news department at the CBS-TV affiliate in Seattle. Most recently he was the host, writer, and producer of a prime-time series on the Learning Channel and before that was a regular contributor to the NBC Sunday Today show.

Customer Reviews

A teaser - and I'm not sure to trust it
This looked like a fascinating premise - debunk all the things we think we know. Unfortunately, the book did not live up to it's promise for me. The author tried to cover so much ground that nothing could be properly explored or explained. Just a lot of random factoids strung together.

I'm normally a fan of the factoid books, but I guess I just had mismatched expectations. I expected more from this book.

I was also vaguely troubled at a number of points during the book. The author used a lot of weasel words (might, could, may, etc.) when trying to convince us that the conventional understanding of a particular point is wrong. If you know better, say so. If it's a matter still in dispute, that's a little too academic for me to care about.

At other points, I found myself challenging his assumptions and sources. The one good thing I can say about this book is that for popular entertainment it was exceptionally well footnoted. (Not that I have the resources to look up all those books, but it was reassuring to think that I could.)

I doubt I'll be picking up any of his other books.

Nearly no primary sources
Television news reporter (now there's a credential) Shenkman attempts to debunk some widely-held but erroneous beliefs about American history from Columbus to the present day, covering topics such as sex, family, the so-called good old days, arts and quotations. It's a fine and admirable idea for a book. Unfortunately, this book does not deliver the idea's promise. Shenkman uses nearly no primary sources, relying on modern historians' research. This gives the result that in many instances, his "proof" of the falsity of one claim is simply another author's claim. Shenkman also has an odd idea of what constitutes American history, often resorting to 17th-century history to refute claims of what "American" life really is. He also quotes extensively but cites sources sproadically, often lumping a few paragraph's worth of sources together in one footnote. There are one or two nuggets of good stuff in here, like the origin of Paul Bunyan, or some of Harvard's history, but the lack of primary sources and generally non-scholarly approach make this book somewhat interesting at best.

Sophmoric
Your sixth grader might find it revealing, but nobody with any knowledge of history will learn much from this disconnected, purposeless collection of factoids. Shenkman acts like an annoying twelve-year old who's memorized 50 state capitals and wants you to listen as he recites them -- and thereby proves how smart he is.

Many of the facts he "reveals" here were things most people would learn from a comptent high-school or college American History class, or else are too irrelevant to be included even there. e.g. pointing out that Paul Revere had two companions, or that Molly Pitcher was not the only woman to fight in the Revolution.

Yes, it's true that most people aren't aware that John Paul Jones later served as a mercenary to Catherine the Great ... but what's the point? Are they supposed to know? Does not knowing reflect some sort of failing in their education? Shenkman certainly implies as much.

But even more annoying is his habit of attacking myths that nobody really believes. He refers to the "firmly held belief that premarital sex is a twentieth-century phenomenon." Firmly held by whom? Shenkman wants to pretend that there are people out there who think that there was no fornication pre-1900, so that he can show how wrong they are (and by contast, how smart and urbane he is). But of course nobody actually thinks this; what they actually think is that it was >less common< in the past than it is now ... which his statistics confirm. Now it probably is true that many people misunderstand or exagerrate how much less common ... but that's a comparatively subtle distinction, and Shenkman doesn't do those.

To pick another, he alludes to the (putatively common) "belief that Presidents were freqently born poor." Excuse me? I highly doubt anyone out there actually under the misapprehension that the majority of Presidents were raised from poverty. People believe that it is >possible for a poor person to become Head of State, and that that possibility is more real in the US than in other countries.

It might be interesting to do a comparative study with, say British PMs or Soviet Politburo members, to see what percentage of them came from comparatively wealthy backgrounds. Alas, that sort of thing is beyond Shenkman. His brilliant idea is to list all the presidents and spin their life stories to make them sound bourgeois: the orphaned Hoover was "brought up by his maternal uncle, the head of a local academy;" Nixon's father owned a gas station; Eisenhower's mother went to college. Best of all is his pointing out that while Lincoln was poor, he was "not as dirt poor as his neighbors."

My guess is that Shnekman fancies himself another Howard Zinn, fearlessly deconstructing the bourgeois myths of America. He isn't. Zinn uses facts to make points; he constructs arguments. Some of those facts are slanted, some points are debatable and some of arguments weak, but it is at least the discourse of an educated adult. Shenkman's is not.