White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War then rewrote the History by Ann Bausum - ESSENTIAL

White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War then rewrote the History by Ann Bausum, 352 pages. NON-FICTION Roaring Brook Press (Macmillan), 2025. $25. 

Language: G (0 swears 0 'f'); Mature Content: G; Violence PG13 (mention of rape, description of violence against enslaved people) 

BUYING ADVISORY: HS - ESSENTIAL 

APPEALS TO: SOME 

After the South lost the civil war, Confederates and their descendants formed organizations like United Confederate Veterans and The United Daughters of the Confederacy. These organizations presented a biased, racist, white-centric story of what happened during that time in the South. They were politically and socially active and managed to get their version of the Civil War into textbooks, movies and popular culture. 

Ann Bausum takes 20 lies told through the Lost Cause narrative, and unwraps them, revealing the truths from the historic record. White Lies was fascinating, but hard to read, as many of the issues addressed had been part of my understanding of the Civil War growing up. It messed with my nostalgia and has made me more aware of the misrepresentations of that time. I'll never see Gone with the Wind the same way again. I hope this somehow makes it into classroom study someday, I know I'm a different person having read White Lies. Well documented and well organized. There are photos of the monuments and the propaganda throughout, as well as a timeline, author's notes, a bibliography and sources. 

Lisa Librarian