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

I had to take a sociology course during my college days, and I was fortunate enough to have a truly interesting professor. He is someone I will never forget and still think about from time to time. He was the kind of teacher who had the ability to make learning engaging and exciting, and it was a class that I actually looked forward to attending.

Anyway, he provided us with a recommended reading list of books that he believed we should take a look at. None of them were compulsory, but I decided to read them all. This particular book is one of those.

I was never really interested in learning history when I was in grade school, not even American History. Many of the historical events in American History that I learned about in school, according to the author of this book, were inaccurate. After reading this book, I felt quite ignorant. For instance, as a child, we were taught that Columbus was a great explorer who discovered America, without any mention of the cruel policies he initiated and the people he killed. I discussed some of these points with my grandfather, who was also a teacher of many subjects. He agreed with some of it, while he wasn't entirely sure about others. Ironically, my children's 3rd grade history textbook is still teaching the people and events in American History in the same way, withholding the truth.

The section that discusses why history hasn't been taught correctly is thought-provoking. The author questions why American History has been dumbed-down with very simplified requirements just to pass the tests. Could this be the reason why so many people don't enjoy learning American History? Could it be why many can't retain it? This book was an eye-opener for me, and I still keep it on my shelf for reference. Although it is controversial, I think it is a book worth reading, especially if you have an interest in history.

My rating for this book is: 5*****

Americans truly need to draw lessons from the Wilson era. It is essential to understand that there is a profound connection between racist presidential leadership and the like-minded public response. This book is of utmost importance and should be read by all.

As for me, history is a subject that I haven't studied since high school. Just like many others, I found it incredibly dull. Growing up in Canada, the teachings were largely similar. I learned about US presidents and how the US and Canada split. However, the underlying theme was always the same - Canada is great and has accomplished so much! But history isn't all rosy. We were not taught about Columbus' involvement in the slave trade, how he used Indians for dog food, or cut off their ears and hands in his pursuit of gold. We didn't learn that Jefferson owned slaves or that American Indian camps were an inspiration for Hitler.

Not knowing these facts is a dangerous thing. History has been rewritten to avoid controversy, thereby eliminating any valuable lessons we could have learned and any independent conclusions we might have drawn. Our teachers have failed us in this regard. Loewen does an excellent job of posing questions about why we learn what we learn and the perils we face by modifying our history, which is highly relevant today.

"History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again." I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone reads this book. It can be found cross-posted at Kaora's Corner.

Ostensibly, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James Loewen is a book about factual inaccuracies in a survey of twelve popular history textbooks. That's a good hook.

However, once the hook lures you in, the place it leads you to is slightly different from what you might expect. This book might more accurately be titled "Subtle Biases Created by Questionable Omissions in a Few Textbooks". But of course, that's not as bombastic a title and you probably wouldn't read the book, would you?

After a brief false start about Hellen Keller being a raging Communist, Loewen begins his review of American history in precolonial days. He starts with the atrocities of the Conquistadors and other European explorers, then moves on to those of the White European settlers, the early American White colonists, the antebellum slave owners, the postbellum racists, and the opponents of the civil rights movement. You can see the pattern here. It holds up for most of the book.

Throughout, Loewen does a good job of showing how textbooks often omit information and whitewash the characters of prominent Europeans and Americans like Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln. For example, it's interesting to read how textbooks describe the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria as "storm-battered" and floundering into the shores of the new world with crews on the brink of mutiny, while Columbus's own journal says the weather was great and everyone was in a good mood. Or how Lincoln made speeches turning his nose at racial equality.

Loewen makes good points about how these omissions seem systematic, downplaying the unpleasant (like the genocide of Native Americans) and emphasizing the heroic (like taming a wilderness that wasn't really that wild). At times, his comments are impressively subtle, like when he notes how textbooks credit the government for anti-discrimination legislation in the 60s when it was really civil rights activists who deserved the credit. This misinformation, he argues, teaches that Blacks and their allies weren't the ones who enacted change and can't view them as inspirations. It's a subtle point, but he makes good arguments about how this is all in the name of making us feel good about our country and pride in our history. And he's good at describing how this is a disservice to students of history and future participants in our government.

BUT, I'm not sure I've read anything so full of liberal White guilt as this book. It's not that I necessarily disagree with any of it, but the tone can be off-putting and sometimes border on zealotry. I was hoping for more interesting tidbits about what history books get wrong, the kind for idle chit-chat. But it soon becomes clear that's not what this book is about. It's really just a vehicle for Loewen's politics. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and I didn't always disagree with his politics. It's just not the book I expected or wanted.

When I first embarked on reading this book, I had the initial impression that it would follow a certain pattern, something along the lines of "your teacher told you this...but this is what actually happened...". You know, like the common claim that "hey, Columbus didn't really discover the new world...blah blah blah", and indeed, there was some of that in the book.

However, what is far more significant and interesting is that this book serves as a scathing indictment of how American history is taught. As I delved deeper into the book, I found myself repeatedly thinking "yep, that's exactly what I was taught", and began to wonder if I would have found American history less dull if it had been filled with as many flawed characters as European history.

Most of my knowledge of European history comes from books. I am an avid reader, and I started with Garrett Mattingly, which is not a bad place to begin. Mattingly doesn't sugarcoat the facts. And when it comes to teaching European history, teachers don't face the same pressures to heroify Europeans as they do with Americans. Instead, we often have the attitude of "oh, those silly, pesky Europeans...". With our own leaders, we are taught to revere them. Take the example of Washington, who is almost saint-like in our teachings. I'm not denying that he was a good person, but he was also a real, flawed individual.

The book makes a compelling argument that if students were taught that it is possible to be flawed and conflicted and still change the world, how much more inspiring that story would be. Instead, only those who study American history in-depth (and for the most part, that doesn't include me) get to learn about the shadows in the heroes.

But this is simply annoying compared to the ethnic bias that pervades the teaching of American history. I found myself deeply saddened as I read example after example of things that I had been taught, and how they were inherently racist. And I'm not just referring to the Civil War. I could give countless examples, but I'm seriously struggling to choose which ones to mention because there are just so many.

This book is not a light and entertaining read filled with "neat facts" about history. It is so much more than that. I was alternately angered, saddened, and ashamed by what passes for teaching history. Not only are we taught incorrect information, but we are taught in a way that almost guarantees we will find it boring.

In conclusion, this was a wonderful and thought-provoking book. I am a better person for having read it, and it has made me reevaluate my understanding of American history and the way it is taught.

This book is truly a remarkable eye-opener. It delves deep into the ways in which we are taught cultural prejudices and a distorted version of American history through classroom textbooks.

I consider myself to be quite liberal, but the author's perspective has completely transformed my understanding. It has made me realize the things that I had simply taken for granted about the foundation of our history.

For instance, figures like Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims, whom we often deify, are not as simplistic as we make them out to be. The book also highlights how racial inequality and sexual inequality are subtly ingrained in the text, in ways that we would never notice unless they are pointed out.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book as a means of seeing things from a different perspective. It is both incredibly interesting and well worth picking up. You will be amazed at how much you can learn and how your perception of history can change.

James W. Loewen wants you to believe that he is far superior to any history teacher in America, anyone involved in creating or publishing history books, and even you, the reader who was fortunate enough to come across his remarkable book that supposedly corrects the record on American history.

However, the reality is quite different. Ninety percent of the book consists of him complaining about how textbooks are profit-driven scams, history teachers are incompetent, and students aren't actively seeking him out for the education they require. The two stars it receives are for the bits of information about American history that he managed to convey, in between his rants about the stupidity of everyone else, which were somewhat interesting. But there was very little that was truly as astonishing as he believed. This is the updated version from Obama's presidency, and he repeatedly claims that people are only now beginning to question the hero worship of Columbus, discover that most early American presidents owned slaves, and so on.

Well, sir, I'm 45 years old. I grew up in small Idaho towns with mostly very conservative Mormon history teachers, and I already knew all about Jefferson and Sally Hemings, that the story of Washington and the cherry tree was a fictional tale, and that Helen Keller was a socialist. Literally, the only new information for me was that Woodrow Wilson was a racist. (I had no prior opinion of him.)

Loewen starts by saying he doesn't blame or aim to defame history teachers, but then promptly does just that. He makes sweeping generalizations about how none of them use primary sources or help students make connections between the events in their textbooks. He claims they teach directly from the textbook, rely on the accompanying materials like tests and videos, and never think creatively. I wish that were the case! My high school US History teacher made us give a presentation every Friday on a topic we had to choose and research ourselves, with at least two sources. I don't even remember having a textbook! As someone who knows many teachers (friends, family members, and my kids' teachers), listening to this man continuously badmouth them was infuriating. He lumped every history teacher in America into a convenient box labeled "Lazy and Uneducated," based on the students he sees as a sociology professor at a small southern liberal arts college.

I can't roll my eyes hard enough.

The annoying tone of the book was not improved by the audiobook reader either. He would puff out his cheeks and expel air whenever he said a word starting with B or P. And since much of this book deals with Black American history... Just picture someone audibly flapping their cheeks by saying "the BLAcks, the BLAcks, the BLAcks" about thirty times a minute. My husband couldn't even listen to five minutes of this and had to leave the room.

The problem with this one is that it contains an overwhelming amount of content and information per page, making it difficult to know where to begin. I found this book to be nearly life-altering, especially since I'm just a week away from starting my studies to become a history teacher. If you're in the US, this is an extremely important book for you to read as you're bound to be shocked by some of the myths about your history that are discussed here. For the rest of us outside the US, this book is equally important as it serves as a guide to understanding why Americans are so remarkably ignorant or ill-informed about their history. Along the way, this book has interesting things to say about various subjects, such as why education doesn't make people more compassionate or more likely to think for themselves, and why textbooks present such a distorted picture of US history in the first place. In short, this is a deeply powerful book about how we should educate our children and why the fact that schools do such a poor job of teaching history is part of the reason why they fail to provide the kind of education students need to help them live their lives in a democracy.

This book bases its arguments around what is printed in (and omitted from) twelve popular textbooks on US history. The lies it focuses on are the distortions and untruths that are commonplace in high school American History textbooks. As the author points out early on, the first year of most college history courses in the US is about trying to remove all the misinformation students have been taught in high school. One of the author's colleagues refers to first-year American History as 'Iconoclasm I and II'.

The distortions he documents here are enough to make your hair turn gray. Take the example of Helen Keller, that ever-nice deaf and blind girl who proved by the sheer force of her life's example that anyone can make it in America - the land of opportunity, home of the free, and land of the brave. What is never mentioned, as Loewen points out, is that this message, which is the story presented of Keller in virtually all textbooks, is the exact opposite of the meaning Keller sought to convey through her own life's work. Keller was a socialist and an avid supporter of the Soviet Union for most of her life. She actively worked to improve the lot of other deaf or blind people while pointing out that they were generally made so by industrial accidents. She said that most of these people had no hope of achieving in any way similar to how she had. If anything, it was her moral outrage at the social inequities in capitalist society that she wanted to be remembered for, as well as the work she did to remove these inequities - work that should make us outraged and do something about these injustices. But instead, our textbooks turn a blind eye and deaf ear to her life's work and message while painting a halo around both her and her teacher, a halo so bright that it hides the truth with its glare.

His discussion of Woodrow Wilson is perhaps even more disturbing. Wilson's support of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, is never mentioned in any of the books, and his segregation of the US government is likewise ignored by all the textbooks. Of course, lies of omission are just as much lies. Did you know that when Wilson was president of Princeton, it was the only northern university not to admit black students? Or that Wilson only met with African American leaders in the White House once and virtually threw them out?

Wilson did a great deal to bring about the modern world, and many of his achievements following World War I, in particular, are a great tribute to him. But, as is pointed out here, American high school textbooks seem incapable of presenting a 'warts and all' picture of US 'heroes'. Take, for example, Wilson's high praise of the film The Birth of a Nation - a jaunty little film whose themes become clear once you know it was originally called The Clansmen and was about the great lie in American history that Reconstruction following the Civil War was a time when African Americans dominated life in the south. Wilson said, "It is like writing history in lightning, and my only regret is that it is all true."

Racism is a key theme in American history and an important way to understand much about modern America. And yet, it is a theme that is mostly ignored in all the textbooks. The part played by plague in depopulating America so that white and black settlers could take over Native American land is not discussed at all in any of the textbooks - despite the fact that it was impossible for America to be so settled without biological warfare. Columbus's extermination of the Native Americans of Haiti is not mentioned in any of the textbooks, and this fact fits well with the theme that heroes can do no wrong and that if they did do wrong, such wrongs are either excused or ignored. As he points out, "In the early 1920s, the American Legion said that authors of textbooks 'are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles, and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation.'"

I had known so little about US involvement in Haiti, but all I'm finding out is deeply shameful and therefore reason enough to keep it hidden. I need to quote this bit: "Then the United States supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the constitution it replaced; the referendum passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768." Of course, 'hilarious' is used here in the sense that we laugh and cry about the same things. However, Columbus's extermination of the estimated 8 million natives of Haiti, often by working them to death, makes most of the horrors that followed on that tortured island pale in comparison.

Did you know that King James (yes, of the Bible fame) gave thanks to the Almighty God for providing the plague that helped depopulate the Americas of its original inhabitants? He was not the first or the last to do this, but you might not think so from any of the history books studied in American high schools as the entire topic remains taboo.

And just what was the Civil War fought for? Surely not something as crass as slavery. His discussion of the treatment given to the end of slavery in textbooks, particularly from the 1920s (a time at the full depth of the nadir of backlash - particularly in southern states, but similar in the north), is heart-wrenching. History in the US seems to be written to ensure that middle-class white kids don't get offended - the effects on African Americans, Native Americans, Spanish Americans, or working-class Americans is of little or no interest to the authors of these textbooks.

The stuff in this book about white people living with Native Americans, with even Benjamin Franklin saying that 'No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies', is a damning indictment of 'our societies' and something else never mentioned in history textbooks.

Did you know that the Native Americans who paid $24 for Manhattan Island weren't even the Indians who lived there? Rather than being stupid, these Indians are the colonial equivalent of the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower to scrap metal dealers. Of course, finding the 'right' Indian to buy land from was very low on the list of priorities of those doing the buying.

Look, I haven't even told you about classes in the United States and how textbooks assure students that there have only been middle-class people in America since the 1600s. The extensive chapters on slavery and reconstruction are mind-blowing. As is the factoid gleaned from his students - 22 percent of whom thought the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea (you'd have thought there was a bit of a hint there in the name of the war, but obviously not).

Look, I could go on and on. This book is truly fascinating and provides some hope and lots of ideas on how history could be taught to help students think for themselves, learn about their history, and engage in the life of their society. None of these involve writing the 'perfect' history book, but all of them involve asking that most essential of all questions (so important they generally ask it in Latin) cui bono? Who benefits?

A magnificent book and one that has filled me with passion. I can't praise this book enough.

While it may not possess the same level of excellence or revolutionary nature as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Loewen has crafted an engaging and eye-opening book. It delves into the concealed disasters within American history that your teachers failed to disclose. Personally, I would recommend reading Zinn's work first. However, this book serves as an outstanding follow-up. Moreover, if the length of Zinn's book initially daunts you, this one is much shorter. It is highly accessible and, once again, in the present context of fake news and mindless patriotism, it is a crucial book. It reveals that America, despite its ideals, has not always lived up to its self-proclaimed aspiration of being the Home of Democracy and Freedom. It is a must-read. Now. Urgently.