Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
$18
“Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself.” —Howard Zinn
What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education.” In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should—and could—be taught to American students. Winner of the American Book Award.
Author
James Loewen
James Loewen is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, winner of the American Book Award. He also wrote Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, and Sundown Towns. He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Loewen was a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont. He died in 2021.
Ron in CO –
I’ve read the book, thought it was great. He did a superb job explaining why it is dangerous for teachers to point out the dark secrets in our past. Really not secrets, but unknown to most.
Shawheen in CO –
What an important impact Loewen has had. As you said in one of your Zinn programs: the power “to influence the consciousness of a generation.”