Freeman march 14 banner     In one of his most iconoclastic
essays, “The Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard observed
that it is crucial to ruling groups to manipulate the thinking
of the ruled. They must get the populace to accept that the
rulers are truly good people working tirelessly to advance the
common good. Toward that end, the rulers employ a bag of tricks,
among them the writing of history to cast the State in a
positive light.  Such accounts do not have to be and usually
aren’t downright false. The writers need only select the “right”
facts to create the desired impression.  The task of historians
who understand that the pro-State accounts are misleading is
difficult, requiring not just that they write differing,
corrective narratives, but also that they fend off the
inevitable reaction that they are doing something “unpatriotic”
in undermining belief in the saintliness of our government.  In
this book Jeff Riggenbach introduces his readers to revisionist
historians who have sought to change the