Anti-Abe Views Resonate in Dixie

As bicentennial nears, an industry springs up around Honest Abe

(NEWSER) - Honest Abe may be gone, but an industry of books, debates, and a Spielberg biopic are all alive and well. With Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial coming next year, all three White House hopefuls have invoked his name, and the US Mint is issuing pennies to honor states where he lived. "He changed America's views through his verbiage and thoughts," one expert said. More»

Says his enemies are 'full of rage at our success'

(NEWSER) - Bill O’Reilly vigorously defended his book, Killing Lincoln, yesterday, after the National Park Service lambasted it for historical inaccuracies . “Our enemies are full of rage at our success,” he said on his show. He said the book contained "four minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected" along with "two typeset errors," which he deemed "a pretty good record." He said the Washington Post’s report that the book wouldn’t be sold at the Fort Theater bookstore is inaccurate. "The media lies at will these days," he said. More»

Ford's Theatre superintendent writes scathing 4-page letter

(NEWSER) - Bill O'Reilly's book, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, has sold nearly a million copies and currently sits at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list . Only problem is, it's riddled with errors, according to a scathing review from the National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre, Salon reports. Here are a few alleged historical missteps:

• Killing Lincoln refers several times to the Oval Office. Little problem: The Oval Office wasn't built until 1909.

Author Joy Masoff read about it on the Internet

(NEWSER) - A Virginia 4th-grade textbook has come under fire for claiming that thousands of slaves fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War—something an overwhelming majority of historians say isn’t true. The book’s author, Joy Masoff, isn’t a trained historian, and says she did most of her research on the Internet. She attributes the claim—which critics say is often used to downplay slavery as a cause of the war—to a website from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. She tells the Washington Post she’s sticking by it. More»

(NEWSER) - Ben Stein loves Wal-Mart—just don’t put one smack-dab in the middle of a historic Civil War battlefield in Orange, Va. The 1864 Battle of the Wilderness was a turning point in the conflict, Stein writes in the American Spectator, and the “battlefield is incredibly important environmentally and historically and emotionally. It reeks of the blood of men fighting for causes they considered sacred.” More»