EVERYTHING (well almost everything) you know about American history is wrong. With these provocative words, a book that turns conventional wisdom about the history of the United States on its head has caught the imagination of the country’s conservatives.

According to The Politically Incorrect Guide to the History of America, a surprise bestseller, early settlers treated native Americans — whom it calls Indians — with respect, buying rather than stealing their land.

President Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves, was opposed to racial intermarriage and did not launch the civil war to free black people, the book says.

So it goes on: rather than saving the country from the Great Depression, President Franklin D Roosevelt deepened the economic misery of the 1930s; Senator Joseph McCarthy was right — there were reds under the beds; and President John F Kennedy’s politics were no better than his tomcat morals.

The book has climbed into the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list thanks to enthusiastic word of mouth and favourable plugs on right-wing talk shows. The liberal New York Times is appalled. “It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise,” the paper commented.

For its author, Thomas E Woods, an Ivy League- educated historian who teaches at a community college in New York, the sales are sweet vindication of a message he believes his colleagues do not want to hear. “It’s a much more serious message than the title suggests, based on some of the most recent scholarship,” he said.

Politically correct teaching in schools has long been a gripe of the right. Noreen McCann, 45, home-schools her six children in St Louis, Missouri, rather than expose them to left-wing thinking.

“I think Christopher Columbus was a good person for discovering America and I teach my children that he wanted to become wealthy and spread the Catholic faith to America,” she said. “I tell them, ‘Your daddy also wants to help people through charity and make money for himself and his family’.”

The Indians, McCann added, were granted too much uncritical reverence in schools. “Modern textbooks whitewash the Indians by saying they lived in harmony with nature and treated it with respect. They used to herd 100 buffalo at a time over cliffs and slaughtered them a herd a time.”

The alleged dominance of the left in teaching positions at universities is another touchstone issue. There was a national furore last week after Ward Churchill, a lecturer in “ethnic studies” at the University of Colorado and an expert on native American history, was invited to lecture at Hamilton College in upstate New York.

The student newspaper revealed that he had written an essay after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 applauding the “gallant sacrifices” of the suicide “combat teams”.

After a fierce row, including questions about whether the long-haired lecturer was falsely passing himself off as a native American, Churchill was forced to resign his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department and the university has launched an inquiry into whether he should be fired.

But a detailed look at some of the more unorthodox views in Woods’s guide are giving pause even to rabid rightwingers. It turns out that the 32-year-old writer from Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberalism, is a defender of the right of Southern states to secede from the union.

Woods is a founder member of the League of the South, a group which argues that “white Southerners” should not have to “give control over their civilisation and its institutions to another race, whether it be native blacks or Hispanic immigrants”.

John Kienker of the Claremont Institute, a right-of-centre history think tank, agreed with Woods that there was a problem with politically correct teaching in schools. “The American founding fathers are presented as terrible racists and wealthy men who oppressed the poor.”

He claimed, however, that Woods’s view of the past was no less distorted. “If you follow his book, you will learn that Lincoln was a tyrant and the real heroes of America were the Southern Confederates.”

Woods admits to sharing some common ground with the left. His book deliberately stops at the year 2000, when George W Bush was elected president. Although his account of American history has won praise from cheerleaders of Bush, he is politically aligned to the isolationist wing of the conservative movement, championed by Pat Buchanan, the populist former presidential candidate.

“If anybody has misled us into a war, it is Bush,” he said.

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