Chapter 1: In What Ways Were We Warped? When I was a boy on our annual summer vacation trips, the family car seemed to stop at every historic marker and monument. Maybe yours did, too. Dad thought it was "good for us," and I suppose in a way it was. Little did he suspect that it was also bad for us -- that the lies we encountered on our trips across the United States subtly distorted our knowledge of the past and warped our view of the world. My sister and I needed to unlearn the myths we were learning in school, but the historic sites we visited only amplified them and taught us new ones. My most recent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me , told how American history as taught in most high schools distorts the past and turns many students off. One result is that only one American in six ever takes a course in American history after graduating from high school. Where then do Americans learn about the past? From many sources, of course -- historical novels, Oliver Stone movies -- but surely most of all from the landscape.

History is told on the landscape all across America -- on monuments at the courthouse, by guides inside antebellum homes and aboard historic ships, by the names we give to places, and on roadside historical markers. This book examines the history that some of these places tell and the processes by which they come forward to tell it. Markers, monuments, and preserved historic sites usually result from local initiative. Typically a private organization -- the Chamber of Commerce, a church congregation, the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- takes the lead, but public monies are usually involved before it''s unveiled. It follows that the site will tell a story favorable to the local community, and particularly to that part of the community that erected or restored it. An account from another point of view might be quite different and also more accurate. Americans like to remember only the positive things, and communities like to publicize the great things that happened in them. One result is silliness: the first airplane was invented not by the Wright Brothers but by Rev.

Burrell Cannon, and the first flight was not in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but in Pittsburg, Texas. It must be true -- an impressive-looking Texas state historical marker says so! Meanwhile, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island all claim the first use of anesthesia. And markers in Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, battle over where Brunswick stew was born. A more important result is racism. People who put up markers and monuments and preserve historic houses are usually pillars of the white community. The recent spate of Martin Luther King avenues and monuments notwithstanding, Americans still live and work in a landscape of white supremacy. Especially in the South, but all across America, even on black college campuses, markers, monuments, and names on the landscape glorify those who fought to keep African Americans in chains as well as those who after Reconstruction worked to make them second-class citizens again. What person gets the most historical markers in any state? Not Lincoln in Illinois it turns out, or Washington in Virginia, but Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry general and first leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in Tennessee.

And the white Southerners misguided enough not to be racist are ignored entirely or converted into "good white Southerners" when remembered. Thus Helen Keller''s birthplace flies a Confederate flag, while she was an early supporter of the NAACP. Other monuments express white domination over Native Americans. A later introductory essay, "Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments," shows how sculptors typically place Native Americans lower than European Americans on historic monuments. Whites always wind up in positions of power and action while people of color are passive on the bottom. Lame Deer, a Dakota leader, sees the same message in the four European American faces carved on Mount Rushmore: What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, "First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns.And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here.

We are the conquerors. The language at historic sites is also warped. All across the country Americans call Native Americans by tribal names that are wrong and even derogatory. According to these histories on the landscape Indians are "savage," whites "discover" everything, and some causes portrayed as stainless today were drenched in blood in their own time. Then there is the matter of who gets memorialized and who gets left out. All too often, memorials heroify people who should not be forgotten, but who should never have been commemorated -- Jeffrey Amherst for example, who initiated germ warfare in the Americas and for whom Amherst College and Amherst, Massachusetts, are named. Across America the landscape commemorates those men and women who opposed each agonizing next step our nation took on the path toward freedom and justice, while the courageous souls who challenged the United States to live out the meaning of its principles lie forgotten or even reviled. Markers and monuments in many states leave out women, sometimes so totally as to be unwittingly hilarious.

The only white woman to get a historical marker in Indiana, to take one offending state, gets remembered for coming into the state minus a body part she lost in Kentucky! Kentucky, meanwhile, erected (the right word) a female Civil War horse with an extra body part that turns her into a him! Historic sites also cover up or lie about the sexual orientations of people who made their history if those orientations were gay or lesbian. Another form of omission takes place at historic homes, which often do not take their own history seriously enough to bother to tell it like it was. Instead of telling visitors what happened to the people who lived and worked there, guides prattle on about what the guests ate and the silverware they used. Even at important historic sites like Independence Hall, guides tell charming but inconsequential and ultimately boring anecdotes rather than talk about the historic events that happened there. Guides almost always avoid negative or controversial facts, and most monuments, markers, and historic sites omit any blemishes that might taint the heroes they commemorate, making them larger and less interesting than life. (High school history textbooks do the same thing.) Presidents especially must be perfect. When historian Richard Shenkman asked a tour guide at FDR''s family mansion in Hyde Park, New York, about Roosevelt''s mistresses, she told him "the guides are specifically forbidden from talking about this.

" Woodrow Wilson''s house in Washington, D.C., says nothing negative about the man who segregated the federal government; a temporary exhibit even credited him with supporting women''s suffrage, which he opposed. Even Franklin Pierce, arguably our least popular president, is lauded by the historical marker in his hometown. But inventing blemish-free heroes doesn''t really work. High school students don''t really buy that the founding fathers were flawless and don''t think of them as heroes to emulate. Instead they conclude that history textbooks are dishonest. Similarly, adult Americans don''t really believe that their exalted forebears were as perfect as their monuments claim.

I have watched tourists grow passive while guides tell them quaint stories about dead presidents. They don''t know enough to ask about what''s being left out, and the social situation doesn''t encourage visitors to ask substantive questions, so they just traipse from room to room on automatic pilot. A critical question to ask at any historic site is: What does it leave out about the people it treats as heroes? A special form of these omissions occurs at war museums, which present war without anguish and instead focus genially on its technology. USS Intrepid in New York City leaves out the Vietnam War entirely -- too "political" for its board of directors. Omissions such as this can be hard to detect, especially for visitors who come to a site to learn a little history without bringing some knowledge of the site with them. People don''t usually think about images that aren''t there. And some images don''t exist anywhere. Scottsboro, Alabama, became world-famous for exactly one incident -- the Scottsboro Case -- but although downtown Scottsboro boasts four historical markers, none mention the Scottsboro Case.

"Pay attention to what they tell you to forget," poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, and this book does -- it covers the Scottsboro Case and three events in Richmond, a city that truncates its public memory on the day the Confederacy ceased to rule it, because of their importance -- and because they are not recognized on the landscape. Nowhere have I seen portrayed the multicultural nature of pioneer settlements, where Native Americans, European Americans, and often African Americans lived and worked together, sometimes happily. Only an obscure marker in Utah offers any hint of the trade in Indian slaves that started in 1513 and continued at least until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. All across America, the landscape suffers from amnesia, not about everything, but about many crucial eve.