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Title: 33 Questions About American History - You're Not Supposed To Ask Author: Thomas E. Woods (www.tomwoods.com) Genre: History Published: 2007 Format: Paperback; 260 pages
This is a collection of 33 short, independent history lessons focused on very significant facts that mainstream media and academia either ignore or misrepresent. The chapters can be read in any order. They are not chronologically ordered.
Each chapter it titled by the question raised based on the conventional wisdom about that topic. But the chapter then proceeds to document why the conventional wisdom is a myth.
If you have any curiosity about American history, you will love this book. You will have trouble putting it down. It is concisely written. It has a large bibliography of notes for each chapter if you wish to cross check the facts.
I love all the chapters. But two of my favorites are:
#6: Was the “Wild West” really so wild? – You’ll find out of course the opposite is true. Crime was actually quite low. Murders were rare. You were much safer from violence than in today’s major cities. You’ll learn about wagon-train government, which was new to me. “Even in the absence of government, the old West was far less violent than most American cities today. Frontiersman developed private mechanisms to enforce the law and define and enforce property rights.”
#32: Who was S. B. Fuller? – Without Google do you know who S. B. Fuller was? I didn’t. Yet he became reportedly the wealthiest black man in America. He was born into poverty in Louisiana in 1905. His single mom of 7 children dies when he was 17. They refused the “relief people” because that was considered shameful at that time. He started with $25 in depression era 1935 and made it into a huge, successful cosmetic company. Eventually owning or controlling 8 corporations. Yet when he publicly advocated blacks embrace the capitalist system as business owners as being the best way to liberate and empower black people instead of political activism, he was shunned. He was accused of blaming the victim by establishment civil rights organizations. He was very much the next generation Booker T. Washington. Why is Fuller ignored by historians? Why is he not a black entrepreneurial icon?
There are 31 other historical myths exposed in the other chapters. Where the American Indians really environmentalists? Did FDR’s new deal lift America out of the great depression? What was the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton presidency? Who is most responsible for the imperial presidency we have today? Did capitalism cause the great depression? Did Hoover sit back and do nothing during the great depression? How anti-war have American liberals actually been over the years?
If you love history, suspect that you have been lied to in school or by the media, or even are curious about history, read this book. You will have trouble putting it down.
Yours in liberty, Thomas Freese