The winners write the history, and the winning states especially so. Thomas Woods, however, sets out to write a primer on American history from a different point of view, one that doesn’t glorify centralization and intervention.
The result is the only primer on American political history that is heavily informed by the economics of the Austrian School. It was also a New York Times bestseller and one of the most controversial books in American history to appear in decades.
From the Puritans through the drafting of the Constitution, the Civil War, the World Wars, the rise of the “Great Society” all the way up through the of the Clinton Administration, this brightly written book discusses the real ideals of the founding, the truth about the Civil War, the heroism of the robber barrons, the ravages of statism in World War I, high taxes, and the war against free markets.
Thomas Woods studied under Rothbard before completing his PhD at Columbia. He writes in a Rothbardian spirit, combining scholarship, radicalism, and a burning desire to communicate. This book was marketed by the publisher to a conservative audience (e.g. the title alone), but what readers actually find is a radical reinterpretation of the whole American experience from a Jeffersonian-Rothbardian point of view.
