Here Lies America: Buried Agendas & Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went Down

Here Lies America is the history class your seventh-grade teacher should have taught—a hilarious tour of the major monuments and tourism attractions that were installed across America to commemorate truly horrible events. Jason Cochran spills the tea on disaster zones, battlefields, terrorist attack sites, and all those infamous Rebel statues—no gravestone unturned. Along the way, Cochran exposes the motivations of the people who installed our monuments to begin with. And when he pauses to seek the meaning behind the early demise of one of his own Confederate ancestors, he uncovers a tragic race-based murder plot that was buried for a century.\nThis is an American journey that could only be undertaken in our turbulent times, celebrating patriotism's occasional absurdities even as it surveys America’s teetering national mythology. If you ever wondered just how things in America got as bad as they are today, Cochran's peek at the rusty plaques and forgotten history of its memorials will fill you in on the backstories you missed. And as he raises an eyebrow to our shared history, he creates a moving miniature portrait of what it really means to be an American: what’s “fact,” what’s “history,” and what really matters.