While the book is revealing in certain aspects, it's not hard to tell there's a certain slant to the information it gives. You can feel the animosity towards the Democratic Party by the lack of negative press towards the Republican Party.

Read this book with an open mind. As much as the author debunks popular textbooks and popular history books, his own published work is far from a complete and unbiased account.

This book was incredibly eye-opening. The D&C says we are to waste out our days bringing hidden things to light. This book helps you to do that. The author goes through the span of U.S. history, from the Pilgrims to Bill Clinton, exposing what the popular myths are. So I learned the following:

-the Native Americans were not the first American environmentalists
-the revolutionary war was was more of a return to common law rights of Englishmen rather than a rebellion
-the Civil War wasn't really about slavery
-secession of the southern states wasn't treason; they were just exercising the right that New York, Rhode Island and Virginia had stipulated when they ratified the Constitution. This was the right that they could withdraw from the union if they ever felt the new government became oppressive
-Lincoln wanted to send black Americans to Africa
-in his fourth debate with Douglas, Lincoln said that he did not, nor did he ever, want to bring about equality between the white and black races
-Andrew Johnson was mistreated by the Radical Republicans of Congress, he was basically "framed" or set up to do something dubiously unconstitutional, so that his political enemies in Congress could then impeach him
-the 14th amendment wasn't properly ratified
-Wilson did not hold Britian and Germany to the same standards of neutrality in regards to their warships before the U.S. entered the war, which is part of the reason why the U.S. ended up entering the war
-Woodrow Wilson was seriously deluded
-JFK's father (who made his fortune as a bootlegger) paid someone to write Profiles of Courage, and then bought tens of thousands of copies of the books and then stashed them in storage, so it would get bestseller status
-JFK made a deal with the Mafia boss to buy votes so he could win the presidency. He philandered with a girlfriend who was also the mistress of this Mafia boss
-FDR wanted to fight a war with Japan and goaded them into it
-FDR was chummy with Stalin and thought that Stalin would work with him to create a world of "democracy and peace." He agreed to "give" Poland to Stalin but told Stalin not to publicize it because he didn't want to lose the Polish vote in the next presidential election
-the Marshall Plan did not help Europe to recover economically after WWII, free markets did
-after WWII, Russian POWs in the U.S. were tear-gassed at Ft. Dix and sent back to the Soviet Union, after they had begged not be sent back there and after USG officials "promised" that they would allow them to stay here (Operation Keelhaul)
-many Communists existed in the U.S.
-a guy who won the Pulitzer prize for reporting that there was no famine in the Ukraine during Stalin's reign actually lied. (There was a massive famine.) When someone asked the Pulitzer prize committee to revoke his honor, they refused
-a historian who was liberal and socialist changed his ways and returned to his boyhood Catholicism
-Lyndon Johnson stole his senate win
-LBJ's war on poverty actually made it worse
-under Clinton's reign U.S. troops were sent to more wars in the world total than in all the other presidencies combined
-Clinton probably bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Mogadishu to detract attention from his Lewinsky scandal n  n

This is a nice alternative to your typical history textbook, but I can't quite bring myself to rate it higher than three stars. There's a lot of great information here, but trying to distill the entire history of the U.S.A. down to three hundred pages is a problematic endeavor no matter how you slice it. Still, Woods' perspective gave me a different take on a lot of things, such as the startling degree to which Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were responsible for escalating World Wars I and II. Definitely a controversial book, as Woods takes on a lot of sacred cows here.

The crucial thing to remember when reading this book is that it is not written or intended as an alternate history of America. Reading it that way will lead to major misconceptions. Instead, it’s a work of corrective history; to delineate (some of) those issues that standard history texts misconstrue or ignore.

Thus the fact that he doesn’t pay much notice to, say, the fact that slavery was a major reason for Southern secession should not be read as disagreement with this commonly held belief. He only mentions things he thinks are wrong; if he doesn’t mention something, it’s probably safe to assume he has no particular bone to pick with the establishment view on that subject.

With that reader’s caveat out of the way, this is an interesting, entertaining, and readable book. It is definitely biased, and reads as such, but although the tone is partisan, and some of his implications are questionable, he takes care to get his facts right.

An example: I’ve recently been reading up on the Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia. When I first read Woods’ account of this event, I thought he had come to a questionable conclusion: American soldiers needlessly died due to the refusal of Clinton’s Secretary of Defense to authorise additional armaments. Many people have claimed this, but Black Hawk Down makes it clear that it is very unlikely that granting the request would have done any good. However, when I reread that passage, I saw that Woods was careful: He notes that the request was turned down, and that the Americans had to borrow armor from other countries, and that eighteen American soldiers died; but he never draws a cause-and-effect relationship between these things. He leaves that as an implication for the reader. So if you’re willing to put up with this sort of rhetoric, where the facts are accurate but the implications may not be, there’s a lot of value to be gleaned out of this work.

My biggest issue with this book is the lack of citations. Sure, there’s a long bibliography in the back, but it’s simply a list of works the author thinks the reader might find valuable. It’s useful for further study from a similar perspective as the author’s, but useless as a means to check the author’s claims. Often he will mention a source inline with the text, and that’s great, but there are still many claims left unsourced. I realize that in a breezy, popular work such as this one, having a bunch of footnotes would be awkward and slow things down, but that wouldn’t preclude having endnotes keyed to page number, which I’ve seen other works (like the aforementioned Black Hawk Down) do. The lack of supporting references makes the book far less useful than it could be as intellectual ammunition.

The information itself is pretty good, and, as I said, generally interesting. Certainly the book is written from a libertarian/conservative point of view, but since nearly all history is written from a Progressive viewpoint (whether admitted or not), this work serves as a useful counterpoint, which is its intended purpose.

Overall, I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in learning salient information you’ve never been taught about American history; just be careful not to be led astray by the author’s omissions or implications.

Like his "33 Questions," this book deals with aspects of American history that most historians won't tell you about--certainly not public school teachers.

The story of American History that is taught in our schools and universities is a simple one, that reads like a morality tale--ignoring facts that reflect badly on "heroes" like FDR.

Read this book and learn what you're not supposed to.

This book presents a much needed counterbalance to the history taught in schools and universities. As such institutions today are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals, anything that disagrees with their ideology is easily brushed under the rug without any of their colleagues challenging it. Is this book biased? Yes, probably. But given the educational bias commonly leaning the other direction, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Woods covers American history from before we were the United States up until the end of the 20th century. Major topics include the nature and purpose of the Constitution (including the all-important and now universally ignored tenth amendment), the Civil War, the Great Depression and the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. In every case, he highlights important facts and perspectives that are commonly ignored by historians (or at least those responsible for history education).

Some of the most stunning moments for me include how our country got involved in both the First and Second World Wars, and the story of Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who happily covered up the Soviet Union's deliberate, systematic starvation of millions of Ukrainians.

I wouldn't recommend this as the *only* American history text you read, but I will say if you skip it, you are probably missing an important perspective.

Have you had a public education? Do you trust Uncle Sugar?

Let the brain-wash reprogramming commence!!! Time to get all that statist, authoritarian, government-knows-best-and-does-no-wrong propaganda out of your system and this is the place to start.

After reading this book, anytime you hear "Hi! I'm from the government and I'm here to help..." you'll run away screaming. And that's a good thing, trust me ;-)

And btw, all these dorks saying it's biased in the opposite direction: read up on the actual sources and prove it wrong.

Good, but not great. Mr. Woods does a good job of presenting unusual facts about American history, but completely lacks nuance in his analysis, which may be a side effect of the format. There is also a minor level of dishonesty, the most egregious example being a wall-eyed representation of the Triple Entente in the lead-up to World War I.

I don't know how to classify this, history, or historical fiction? Author's assertions were rather poorly documented.

Liberals and progressives will probably hate this, because it debunks a lot of the history we've been indoctrinated with. It also asserts that liberty and free markets work, not government intrusion in our lives.

Great supplement to ANY history course from grade school through grad school. It's nice to see what the text books usually leave out.

We all have a thing or two to learn about what we have be lead to believe in high school and some college history classes.