James Loewen

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has gone on to win an American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and to sell over half a million copies in its various editions. 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, and the Mai Lai massacre, 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. This 10th anniversary edition features a handsome new cover and a new introduction by the author.

Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Emily McMeans

“Critical thinking requires assembling data to back up one's opinion. Otherwise students may falsely conclude that all opinions are somehow equal.”

“…there is a reciprocal relationship between truth about the past and justice in the present.”

“A map found in Turkey dated 1513 and said to be based on material from the library of Alexander the Great includes coastline details of South America and Antarctica. Ancient Roman and Carthaginian coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing archaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas more than once.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“Authors seem unaware that most land sales be- fore the twentieth century, including sales among whites, transterred primarily the rights to farm, mine, and otherwise develop the land, not the right to bar passage across it.”

“Before the Civil War, these matters were states' rights, ver- theless, South Carolina claimed the right to determine whether New York coula prohibit slavery within New York or Vermont could define citizenship in Vermont.”

“…the leadership positions that African Americans frequently reached among American Indian nations from Ecuador to the Arctic show that people do not automatically discriminate against others on the basis of skin color.”

“In short, slavery prompted the United States to have imperialist designs on Latin America rather than visions of democratic liberation for the region.”

“…the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not African Americans, into the new order.”

Segregation: Asystem of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for white employers.

Lies My Teacher Told Me quotes

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