Richard Shenkman – författare

“Was there really a valiant little Dutch boy, a protesting Lady Godiva, a fiddling Nero, or a prudish Queen Victoria? No, says Shenkman ….No person, event, or thing is safe from Shenkman’s corrections.” —Booklist

Founder of George Mason University’s History News Network and bestselling author of Presidential Ambition and One Night Stands with American History, Rick Shenkman is an historian, a rebel, and a myth debunker par excellence. In Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History, he explodes some of the most honored and long-held misconceptions about kings and despots, wars and empires, religions, inventions, from the glory days of the Roman Empire to the dark days of World War Two. Fascinating, edifying, and irreverent, here is the real world history you were never taught in school—for history buffs and confirmed trivia fanatics everywhere!

The truth and nothing but the truth—Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends.

The story of Columbus discovering the world was round was invented by Washington Irving.

The pilgrims never lived in log cabins.

In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock.

Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell in love with his best friend's wife.

Independence wasn't declared on July 4th.

There's no evidence that anyone died in a frontier shootout at high noon.

After World War II, the U.S. government concluded that Japan would have surrendered within months, even if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In this timely, illuminating, and often shocking book, Richard Shenkman reveals that it is not just recent presidents but all presidents who have been ambitious--and at times frighteningly so, willing to sacrifice their health, family, loyalty, and values. Presidential Ambition is a book that will permanently alter the way we think about past, present, and future American presidents.