White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War and Rewrote History by Ann Bausum (Roaring Brook Press, 368 pages, grades 9 and up). Beginning with a list of the 20 lies covered in this book from “Slavery was a compassionate institution” to “We erase history when we remove symbols of the Confederacy,” the book goes on to debunk these lies in four sections. The first covers American history leading up to and including the Civil War, the second is how the myth of Lost Cause was constructed and spread after the war and reconstruction ended. Part three discusses how this propaganda was spread through the country via monuments, Hollywood films, and children’s education, and the final section brings us up to the present in which steps to remedy the lies and propaganda are being met with a powerful backlash. The “Gallery of the Lost Cause” throughout the book shows various statues and monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders, including information on the cost, history, and current status of each one. Includes a note from the author on the evolution of her own thinking from her Virginia public school education in the mid twentieth century to the present, a timeline, and extensive source notes, bibliography, and index.
This is a fascinating and relevant book about how slavery, racism, the Civil War, and the lies surrounding the Confederacy and its history have seeped into the American consciousness, largely through very deliberate efforts to infiltrate textbooks, public history, and Hollywood. Although I didn’t grow up in the South, I still absorbed much of this misinformation through my own education and consumption of popular culture. The final part of the book does an excellent job of showing how we are still living with the consequences of this propaganda today. I do wish this book were more accessible for middle school and high school readers. I’m a medium-fast adult reader, but even with daily reading it took me weeks to get through the text-dense pages unbroken by any sort of graphics or sidebars. It’s hard for me to imagine many teenagers sticking with this book all the way through, and that’s a shame. Educators might want to consider using excerpts from it in history classes as a way of bringing its valuable content to more readers.
How the Word Is Passed: Remembering Slavery and How It Shaped America by Clint Smith, adapted for young readers by Sonja Cherry-Paul (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 336 pages, grades 7 and up). Based on the 2021 book, this version for young readers tells of Clint Smith’s travels across America and to Africa looking for how the story of slavery is told. He starts his journey in at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, then continues to the Whitney Plantation and Angola Prison in Louisiana, Blandford Cemetery in Virginia, various sites in New York City, Galveston Island, Texas, and Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal. His reports on what he sees and the people he speaks with show how the history of slavery has been taught, how that is (sometimes) changing, and how people react to those changes. Includes a glossary and a list of selected sources.
I read the original version of this book when I took a trip down south in 2023, and it really made me look at the museums I visited there differently. The writing is so engaging, with each section told as a personal sojourn to the various places that includes of a fascinating variety of voices. Smith writes in the epilogue about interviews with his own grandparents, which could serve as inspiration for kids to learn history by having conversations with older relatives. While this does not go nearly as deeply into the history as White Lies, it was a much quicker read and would be a useful book to read before going on historical field trips.