John Seiler Editorial writer The Orange County Register jseiler@ocregister.com

I can't remember the last time an avowedly conservative or libertarian history book made the New York Times best-seller list. But that's what was achieved recently by "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," by Thomas E. Woods Jr., a young history professor at the State University of New York.

He writes from the perspective that America was founded as a land of liberty - meaning free speech, religion and association - but also property rights and the free market. He uses Austrian economics, a rigorous free-market approach, to criticize the march toward statism the country has taken for more than a century.

Here are few shibboleths he gets rid of:

The Indians who sold their land to the Puritans weren't primitive socialists. "No evidence has ever been found of any New England tribe that thought of all land as common property."

The Puritans didn't steal the Indian lands. "The colonial governments actually punished individuals who made unauthorized acquisitions of Indian lands. ... Indian consent to Plymouth settlement was immediate."

He follows Edmund Burke, the British statesmen who defended the colonies' right to independence, in saying that the American Revolution was a "conservative" one - to conserve the rights of Englishmen in America. The "colonists did not seek the total transformation of society" ofthe French Revolution of 1789 or the Soviet revolution of 1917.

On the Constitution, Woods is emphatic that the founders, especially in the Federalist Papers, "wanted to reassure" the several states "that the proposed federal government would not compromise the states' rights of self-government." Oh, and the "general welfare" clause in the Constitution "doesn't mean that the federal government gets to spend money on whatever it wants."

Every U.S. representative and senator should read this book.

The rest of the book sketches the struggle in our country, now two centuries long, between the centralization the Constitution wasn't supposed to bring and those who resisted the centralization. He takes the view that the South had a right to secede in 1861. And he argues that the major cause of the war was not slavery, but to save the Union and consolidate its power. Here's a juicy quote from U.S. Grant, the victorious Yankee general who owned slaves until the 13th Amendment abolished slavery: "If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side."

In his discussion of the decades after the war, Woods counters the "gilded age" argument of so many historians about exploited workers with a description of how the free market actually made America the wealthiest country on earth. The businessmen of that era, although sometimes corrupt and using government to advance their interests, "did more for America than all the big-government programs combined."

One of my favorite chapters describes how the depression of 1919-20 was cured with the tax cuts of the 1920s under two of our greatest presidents, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Woods blames the Great Depression not on capitalism, but (following Austrian-school economist Murray Rothbard) on monetary manipulation, tariffs, and vast increases in federal bureaucracy and taxation under President Herbert Hoover. FDR came along and continued and deepened the Hoover policies, calling them the New Deal. Recovery didn't happen until World War II.

There follow incisive sections on the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Great Society and so much more.

The book is only 246 pages long and its readable layout includes incisive sidebars with such headings as "A Book You're Not Supposed to Read" and "Anti-Soviet Historian Was Right."

This now becomes the best short introduction or review of American history. I can only encourage Woods someday to write a longer, more comprehensive American history, on the order of Paul Johnson's 1,104-page "A History of the American People." We can't get enough good history.