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Cathy Young | From the June 2005 issue
Thomas Woods' best-selling Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is primarily pitched to conservative readers, but it's also crafted for libertarian appeal. Its rhetoric is strongly anti-statist, pro-market, and opposed to centralization; in interviews, Woods has called himself a "Jeffersonian" championing liberty. Scratch that ostensibly libertarian veneer, though, and you'll find…something else.
Much of the book's first half is an apologia for the antebellum South and its cause in the War Between the States (Woods' preferred term). Taking the familiar view that the war was fought not over slavery but over competing economic interests, Woods consistently casts the motives of slavery's opponents in the worst possible light: Those who wanted to keep slavery out of the new territories, he claims, mainly wanted to keep those territories all-white. The abolitionist movement is faulted for "belligerent an