intelligence or capability, but of the methodology they used in arriving at the conclusions they wished to promote. In order to validate their theses, they refer to documents of well-established scholars who came before them. Notes citing these “court historians” and authorities become the standard by which a new historical work is judged. In this book the author has not relied on the conclusions offered by other writers. Instead, he views the established facts of United States history from the standpoint of commonsense to decipher instances of oversight, obfuscation and obvious (but masked or denied) interest. These are some of the distortions he highlights: (1) The greatest blight in our past is not slavery, per se, but the conscious and willful elimination of 3 million Amerindians in order to seize their lands, the first unrecorded Holocaust. (2) A British general’s lust for a fellow officer’s wife may have directly contributed to the loss of the American colonies. (3) In order to forge a United States of America not only was it necessary to legitimize slavery as an integral part of the Constitution but slaves had to be counted as three fifths of the total population of the state, (4) The Constitution was composed exclusively by and for men of means and its fundamental goal was to maintain the status quo. (5) The conflict between the North and South was never over slavery; it would have required three fourths of the states to amend the Constitution, but over control of the Senate, the only legislative body controlled by the establishment. (6) The major blunder committed by Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government was to actively solicit the military support of the Border States, which opened the door to a land invasion from the North — impossible if they had remained within the Union. (7) Aside from James Madison, Lincoln was the worst wartime president in our history; his strategy was responsible for the 600,000 deaths. (8)The Emancipation Proclamation was designed to bring the Southern States back into the Union. (9) Reconstruction was doomed to failure because almost all of the South’s wealth consisted in the value of its slaves. (10) What makes this nation unique is that it had to establish its own traditions and create its own mythology in short order and quickly weave a narrative that would inspire and unify the citizenry.

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