Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Paperback)

by James W. Loewen (Author) "THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT HEROIFICATION, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes..." (more)
Key Phrases: twelve textbooks, inquiry textbooks, narrative textbooks, United States, Native Americans, African Americans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Loewen's politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks—including The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy; and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti—is sure to please liberals and infuriate conservatives. In condemning the way history is taught, he indicts everyone involved in the enterprise: authors, publishers, adoption committees, parents and teachers. Loewen (Mississippi: Conflict and Change) argues that the bland, Eurocentric treatment of history bores most elementary and high school students, who also find it irrelevant to their lives. To make learning more compelling, Loewen urges authors, publishers and teachers to highlight the drama inherent in history by presenting students with different viewpoints and stressing that history is an ongoing process, not merely a collection of—often misleading—factoids. Readers interested in history, whether liberal or conservative, professional or layperson, will find food for thought here. Illustrated.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
When textbook gaffes make news, as with the tome that explained that the Korean War ended when Truman dropped the atom bomb, the expeditious remedy would be to fire the editor. Loewen would rather hire a new team of authors bent on the pursuit of context instead of factoids. In Loewen's ideal text, events and people illuminating the multicultural holy trinity of race, gender, and social class would predominate over the fixation on heroes and acts of government. Such is the mood adopted throughout this critique of 12 American history texts in current use. Vetting 10 topics they commonly address--from the Pilgrims to the Vietnam War--Loewen bewails a long train of alleged omissions and distortions. To account for the deplorable situation, he offers this quasi-Marxist explanation: "Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us." Certainly students' appalling ignorance of history is troublesome, and broken families and excessive TV viewing are at least the equals of white male conspirators as the cause. However, libraries located where dissatisfaction with textbooks exists should be interested in Loewen's critique. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; 1 edition (September 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684818868
• ISBN-13: 978-0684818863
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (383 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,428 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1,103 of 1,182 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for any Student of American History, August 6, 2001

By A Customer

As a conservative white male who views revisionist history quite skeptically, I did not expect much from this book. As a student of American history, I understood what a woeful job our textbooks and (unfortunately) our teachers do in teaching the actual history of this country, but I never expected both the depth and the level of scholarship Mr. Loewen presents in this book. It is well researched, well written and much needed. Having grown up near an Indian reservation, my own personal studies in original sources confirm how accurate Mr. Loewen really is. The book is hardly "political correctness" run amuck as suggested by one review. And his point is not to paint America as evil or bash Christian Europeans as two other reviews would lead us to believe. This type of simple minded attack does not tell us anything about the book, but rather betrays the reviewers' own entrenched viewpoints - viewpoints that certainly will not be changed by exposure to the truth. In fact, the criticisms make Mr. Loewen's point almost better than he can as to why history is taught in feel-good myths rather than truth. Yes, Mr. Loewen treats certain issues and not others. He tells us he is doing so several times throughout the book, and makes apologies for it. This is not intended to be a replacement for a full history of the United States. Mr. Loewen makes good and valid suggestions as to such replacements. It is not even intended to be a complete coverage of all the things our history texts get wrong. He would need several more volumes for that, and even then would get some of it wrong. For those who actually read the book (and many reviewers obviously did not), he admits all of this. Mr. Loewen's book is an important start. But it is only a start. One reviewer, in criticising the book, stated that we must learn from our past. But this is exactly the point of the book. We must and can learn from our past, but only if we have the objectivity and moral courage to accept what that past was. As a white Christian Anglo-Saxon male, I feel no need to beat myself up as a result of the deeds done by white Christian Anglo-Saxon males who are long dead. But I do feel the need to move forward with as good an understanding as I can have of the cultural and personal histories that cause people to act as they do - especially those whose backgrounds are so different from my own.

227 of 251 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest History Does NOT Diminish America in Any Way, January 15, 2003

By	C. Colt "It Just Doesn't Matter" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In this superb book, James Loewen argues what most Americans have understood since childhood, namely that our American History textbooks, are, boring, theme-driven, inaccurate and largely ineffective at imparting the richness of their subject. While the books title and argument may seem like a leftist gerrymander, they are not. Loewen, a professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont (who spent several years analyzing ten high school American History textbooks totaling more than 8,000 pages), is not out to reverse the traditional cast of heroes and villains in American history. Instead, Loewen advocates an honest and inclusive history that simply reveals events as they actually happened. While this may expose some dark truths about heroic people and events in American history, and may cast historical villains in a new light, Loewen does not believe it will cause students to despise their country. On the contrary, he argues that revealing conflicts and problems that our text books ignore or conceal will make American history come alive and will almost certainly enhance students appreciation for their country. Ironically, while many textbook editors and teachers fear that altering their inaccurate and theme-driven content will cause students to despise their country, they miss the fact that this is precisely what the specious, vapid nature of the textbooks already accomplishes. Some of Loewens interesting observations are contained below:

COLUMBUS

Columbus was almost certainly not the first European to discover or colonize North America. He tortured and mutilated the native population of Haiti and eventually exterminated it by working the inhabitants to death searching for gold. All of these facts are available in the journals of Columbus and his colleagues.

NATIVE AMERICANS
Prior to the arrival of white settlers, North America was thickly settled with tens of millions of Indian tribes that formed a complex civilization consisting of advanced agricultural techniques (guess where white settlers learned it from), trade, roads, villages, and government. The white settlers wiped out most of these people at first inadvertently by spreading disease, and then deliberately through wars of extermination. History text books often present Indians as sparse, primitive, violent (it was actually white people who scalped Indians), and inevitable victims of progress.

RECONSTRUCTION
For more than one hundred years, history textbooks have characterized post-Civil War Reconstruction as a combination of white corruption and black ineptitude. Few mention that the ultimate cause of Reconstructions failure was the terrorism that some white southerners perpetrated against black people and whites who favored reconstruction. Many of the so called carpetbaggers and scallywags were in fact anti racists who attempted to help rebuild the south along egalitarian lines. And when given even minimal opportunities (most of which were subsequently dismantled by the government), blacks were able to build successful businesses and to win the Kentucky Derby a few times.

LABOR AND SOCIAL CLASSES
High school textbooks never admit that America even has social classes. They treat labor problems as something that happened a long time ago and which the government fixed of its own good will.

PROGRESS
The textbooks also present the United States as the vanguard of social progress while failing to admit that many of the social issues we still strive for such as equality between men and women have already been accomplished by other nations or people in history.

CIVIL RIGHTS
According to American history text books, the government spontaneously decided to give civil rights to blacks and other oppressed minorities, but this decision did not result from a populist struggle that was initially met with state sponsored violence and brutality.

VIETNAM
Similarly U.S. history textbooks argued that the Vietnam War sort of happened and sort of ended. They dont examine why the U.S. got involved in the war and why it stopped fighting. They also overlook the brutality of the war that was waged largely against civilians on whom the United States dropped three times as much bomb tonnage as all theatres of World War II combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT THIS WAY
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Loewens book is his examination of why high school history books are permeated with boredom and lies. Surprisingly, Loewen does not blame this phenomenon on the power elite that ultimately controls the publication of these books. Instead, Loewen concludes that a number of damaging, but less insidious processes are at work. For example, since many history teachers dont really know their subject, they are afraid to challenge or teach outside of the textbooks, which become a source of pedagogical authority. Even qualified and highly motivated teachers are often afraid to deviate from the textbook because they believe that failing to paint a rosy picture of America will somehow hurt students. Finally, there is the textbook publishing industry that is understandably motivated to sell books more than it is to tell the truth.

Loewen correctly concludes that when you unmask many of the lies in U.S. History text books, America does not suddenly become odious, and while people like Columbus may become more controversial, they are not transformed into villains. Instead American history is full of conflict that displays the richness and fascination of its history. Concealing and distorting this conflict is sort of like telling a child that his/her parents are perfect. The child will not only get bored with these themes but will quickly learn that they are false. If the child learns that his/her parents made mistakes, then far from hating them, the child will probably appreciate their humanity and learn more from them. History is the same way.

60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A MUST for parents and educators., December 26, 2000

By	Mike Baum (Anchorage, AK USA) - See all my reviews

In *Lies My Teacher Told Me*, sociologist James W. Loewen looks at twelve popular American history textbooks used in public high schools today and concludes that they are inexcusably inaccurate and biased. He shows that, in addition to their being sloppy and error-prone due to incompetence, textbooks oversimplify historical facts and causes, obscure the process by which historical interpretations are made and revised over time, perpetuate national myths and even willfully lie. Often, Loewen reveals, this is done in the service of promoting blind patriotism in students or in capitulation to various interest groups and other pressures that work to undermine the professionalism and integrity of the textbook industry itself. A multitude of examples from actual textbooks used today will likely disabuse many lay readers--including many high school teachers, according to cited studies of their expertise in their own field--of cherished but wrong beliefs.

Some readers will object to Loewen's obvious "liberal bias." There is a case to be made for this. I, for one, would like to see a deconstruction of textbooks' pervasive anti-capitalistic mentality. Is it honest history, for example, to mention the antitrust suit against Standard Oil but not to mention the fact that its business practices did not harm consumers but benefited them? Or that many of the reforms of the Progressive Era--the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, to name but two--were lobbied for by "big business" (appropriate here, but what a loaded term!) to throttle their competitors? Or that there is more than one theory of the causes of the Great Depression--and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal only prolonged it?

But, no matter. Such criticisms are beside the point. False and careless statements like "President Truman 'easily settled' the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb"--a real example from a textbook--are simply not open to dispute on grounds of ideology. And while some of Loewen's other examples of textbook distortion (or his proposed remedies) are questionable, enough are valid that he makes his general case. All of us, liberals, conservatives or otherwise, should be able to agree that to teach a one-dimensional, "Disney version of history" (as Loewen calls it), in which complexities and controversies are smoothed over or ignored and students' understanding of causality in history is impaired, is plain wrong.

Loewen also tries--and not necessarily with an outsider's perspective, as he himself is a high school history textbook author, who knows firsthand the near futility of publishing a textbook of integrity--to explain the causes of our American history textbook troubles. In this connection, I must say that the *Booklist* editorial review that Amazon.com has posted to this webpage is misleading. The review states that "To account for the deplorable situation, he [Loewen] offers this quasi-Marxist explanation: 'Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us.'" But even Dr. Loewen is not *that* bad. Contrary to the review's implication, he ultimately dismisses this "elitist" explanation as an oversimplification, stating that "power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has." He then discusses other explanations, such as the way textbooks are chosen--often by state-appointed adoption boards, which are sensitive to organized interest groups out to promote textbooks that further their own agendas, and which never have time to read 800+-page textbooks, in any case. Blame is also laid on textbook publishers, which have a financial incentive to copy success (i.e., traditional, mediocre textbooks) and to refrain from rocking the boat by being original and, thus, possibly arousing controversy; textbook authors, who for a variety of reasons have no incentive to do quality work; and teachers, many of whom aren't as expert in their subject as they should be or are afraid (not without good reason) of getting into trouble with parents and administrators should they teach against the book. Loewen's full account, which is fairly complex and discerning, of the various factors that interact to produce our high school American history textbooks, I leave for the reader to examine.

In closing, I would like to observe, in regard to the aforementioned ridiculous review by *Booklist*, that if one looks at *Booklist's* webpage, one sees that the publication itself is responsible for the review of textbooks that are used in public schools. Given this fact, the disrespectful, dismissive, even dishonest, treatment it accords *Lies My Teacher Told Me* should not surprise us. How ironic it is that Dr. Loewen's point has been made for him here, in this very forum, by his opponents.