Correcting the politically correct: the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is a must-read for those seeking historical facts free of white-washing and revisionism.(Book Review)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D., Washington: Regnery, 2004, 256 pages, paperback, $19.95. Available from American Opinion Book Services, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, W154912 (plus shipping and handling); by phone at 920-749-3783; or online at www.aobs-store.com.

With his latest book, Dr. Thomas Woods has accomplished what heretofore seemed impossible. His achievement isn't merely that he has written a book capably addressing and correcting the scourge of political correctness, but that his sorely needed work earned several weeks of notice on the New York Times bestseller list and that it has earned the condemnation of the most determined protectors of correctness at the Times. The Times steered its own Adam Cohen to pen a lengthy diatribe savaging the book. Appearing on the newspaper's editorial page (hardly an inconsequential bit of space), Cohen's hatchet job insists that the Guide is "historically wrong," "full of dubious assertions," and replete with "ideologically loaded" arguments.

So there you have it: the Establishment's most consistent dispenser of what's "fit" (the Times claims that it presents "All the news that's fit to print") doesn't like this book. We contacted Dr. Woods about the attention his book has generated, and he expressed sheer delight about Cohen's attack, calling it "great publicity." More to the point, he added that "our betters at Cohen's paper do their best to ensure that certain perspectives are neither covered nor even acknowledged. No wonder they hate my book."

Still a relatively young man and a professor of American history at one of New York's state colleges, Woods has himself triumphed over what he set out to correct. He endured public schooling in Massachusetts before earning a bachelor's degree at Harvard and two advanced degrees at Columbia University. How he emerged from all of that as an articulate and well-schooled champion of America's true history would make an interesting book all by itself.

Lively Lessons

Far from a dull textbook, his Guide is repeatedly spiced with humor amidst page after page of solid history. For example, he completely debunks the widespread belief held by just about every 20th-century graduate of the nation's government school system that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. The South was being victimized by tariffs that benefited only the North, he claims, and state after state broke away in order to maintain the type of independence each possessed when the union was formed. Woods quotes slave-holding Union General Ulysses S. Grant: "If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side."

The book's two chapters correcting popularly held attitudes about the war are worth the entire book. He maintains that "there never was a civil war" because that type of conflict is one "in which two or more factions right for control of a nation's government." But, he notes, "The seceding Southern states were not trying to take over the United States government; they wanted to declare themselves independent." Nor is it correct, he believes, to label the conflict a "War Between the States" because "Florida was not at war with New Hampshire, nor Rhode Island with Mississippi." The war was fought "between the United States government and the eleven Southern states that formed the Confederate States of America." What then would he accept as an accurate name for the struggle? He suggests that it be known as "the War of Northern Aggression."