What we know and learn about our country during our lifetime we get from media reports; what happened before we were born we learned through the history books we read in school.

Knowing the truth about what goes on in the United States today is difficult because our media is increasingly biased and often dishonest. As it turns out, American history textbooks, both old and new, are inaccurate and biased, too, and some of what we thought we knew is false.

Ray Raphael has authored three books on American history, the most recent of which is Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past, published in 2004. In writing this book he reviewed twenty-two elementary, middle school, and high school texts and found that while some were better than others, all contained serious lapses.

As examples he describes “warmed-over” stories from the 1800s, such as the story of Paul Revere’s Ride, which he said was “popularized in 1861 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who distorted every detail of the event to make his story better.”

 “More of the myths are perpetuated in elementary and middle school texts than in AP high school texts,” he said, “but this raises a troubling question: why are we telling children stories that we know to be false? Worse yet: why do we give these tales our stamp of approval and call them ‘history’”?

He cites another book in which the author reveals that she discovered ninety separate state and local “declarations of independence” that were written before the one we all celebrate. This shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Thomas Jefferson had a lot of company thinking about declaring independence.

Such myths pervert our view of historical and political processes, Mr. Raphael said, leaving students with a warped idea of how their country was born and has evolved.

In addition to these myths and fanciful stories, many of today’s texts now also have a distinct anti-America bias, and try to paint our country as a evil influence in the world.

A new book by Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, details some of this in 48 Liberal Lies about American History. In an interview with FrontPageMagazine.com, Professor Schweikart discusses some of the inaccuracies he found in the top, best-selling college U.S. history textbooks that he examined.

About the idea that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, that ended the Cold War, Mr. Schweikart responded: “This lie is prominent, and in some form appears in most of the textbooks … Gorby is portrayed as this good-hearted, wonderful reformer who had to convince that evil Ronald Reagan that nukes were bad. It's absurd … [Gorbachev] had to do something about the Soviet economy because … it was collapsing like a house of cards. Reagan kept the pressure on, especially with ‘Star Wars,’ and the evidence is overwhelming from the former Soviet archives that this was what happened. Reagan forced Gorbachev to change, not vice versa.”

Among the perfidies Prof. Schweikart exposes are these:

• Columbus was responsible for killing millions of Indians
• Women had no rights in early America
• The Constitution was the creation of powerful elites protecting their financial interests
• The Rosenbergs were not spies, and were wrongfully executed
• Sen. Joseph McCarthy concocted the "Red Scare," and there was nothing to fear from Communist subversives
• John F. Kennedy was killed by LBJ and a secret team to prevent him from getting us out of Vietnam
• Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK because he was a deranged maniac—not because he was a Communist
• LBJ's Great Society had a positive impact on the poor
• Neither Ronald Reagan's election nor the "Contract with America" proved the triumph of conservative ideas
• September 11 was not the work of terrorists—it was a government conspiracy
• No terrorists, al-Qaeda leaders, or weapons of mass destruction were hiding in Iraq
• Muslim terrorists are poor and uneducated and hate us because we support Israel
• Global warming is a fact—and it's a man-made, American-driven problem

What kinds of images do distortions like those exposed in Prof. Schweikart’s book create in the minds of readers? Can they really understand their country and what it stands for? Will they be moved to defend its ideals if they believe those lies represent the truth?

When history is not factual, when it is distorted to make a story more appealing or to accomplish some narrow political goal, when the reporting of historical and contemporary events is in the hands of unprincipled, dishonest and biased people, truth is lost, and without truth we are a rudderless ship in a fierce storm.

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