History Revisited: A Look at Richard Shenkman's Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History

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

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

* The pilgrims never lived in log cabins.

* In Concord, Massachussetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were born 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. -- back cover blurb, Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History.

One of the true constants of the American educational system is that no matter how potentially interesting the subject of history could be, it's always taught in such a way that most kids end up either bored or with a distinct distaste for the topic altogether.

Another sad but seldom-discussed reality is that even when teachers are creative, engaging, and get their students "psyched" on the lives and times of fun folk such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Armstrong Custer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and JFK, more often than not they hand down "facts" that aren't facts at all, but are, as the book title puts it, Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History.

"We usually admit," Shenkman writes in his Author's Note, "that Americans are somewhat ignorant of history, but we don't realize how ignorant." Studies and polls indicate that "a clear majority" of our fellow citizens don't recall that the term "Bill of Rights" refers to the first 10 amendments to the Constitution or that Abraham Lincoln was President in the mid-19th Century. And, to matters worse, most of what Americans do know about history is, point-blank, wrong. "Not only have (Americans) forgotten what they should remember," Shenkman says, "but they have remembered what they should have forgotten."