Thomas DiLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln, brilliantly unravels over a hundred years of lost history over the course of its 300 pages. Most of us have always accepted the version of the Lincoln story that we were taught in school: That Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator", that he saved the Union by committing troops to stop the racist Confederates.

What DiLorenzo is able to show is how inaccurate that myth really is.

Was Lincoln an abolitionist? Nope, says DiLorenzo. He carefully shows in the second chapter what Lincoln really thought of slaves and free blacks during his day. He wanted them all sent to live in colonies in South America, thought that it was their natural place to be inferior to white men, and would have continued slavery in the South for his entire presidency had the Confederacy not seceded.

Was the Civil War really about slavery? Nope. DiLorenzo shows how the economic policy of Lincoln and the Whigs, mercantilism and centralization, was the real source of tensions between North and South. Slavery was a factor only in the sense that it became a point of contention within that flawed economic policy.

For those who are searching for honest depictions of history, this is a must-have book.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein