"American History for Home Schools," by 16 members of the Society of Independent Southern Historians

I have received my copy of "American History for Home Schools, 1607 to 1885, With a Focus on Our Civil War," by "16 Members of the Society of Independent Southern Historians."

This is the link to the Society of Independent Southern Historians, http://southernhistorians.org/

You can download it for free also according to their page, but archival purposes, I wanted a hard copy.

As you might assume, it is a farrago of Lost Cause talking points. It has been advertised for sale in the Confederate Veteran.

The list of the sixteen contributors contains the usual neo-Confederates: Clyde N. Wilson, Karen Stokes, H.V. Traywick, Joseph Stromberg and others who really have little to lose in terms of credibility with historians.

What was interesting is that one of the contributors is Earl L. Ijames, of NC, who has been noted elsewhere as a purveyor of questionable historical assertions.

It might be asked how useful this book will be to advocating a Lost Cause view of history. The question it potentially could be a lot. The past is always viewed from the present, and thus it is always seen differently.

In rewriting the Lost Cause argument to make it more desireable to people in the present is a necessary and useful task in the advocacy of any view of history.

Whether they have done a good job or not in this book, I don't know and I am not going to read it. It is going on the shelf.

The other question is whether anyone is going to read it. I don't know. However, the question of how many people will read it, needs to be viewed in the framework of how many people do you need to pass down through time a viewpoint of history. Not that many actually. There are still monarchists out there and they have their events.

Mostly this entry is about who Earl L. Ijames is revealed to be.