From the
Common Courage Press:
Americans have lost touch with their history, and in this thought-provoking book, Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying twelve leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable.
Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.
In ten powerful chapters, Loewen reveals that:
-
The United States dropped three times as many tons of explosives in Vietnam as it dropped in all theaters of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
-
Ponce de Leon went to Florida mainly to capture Native Americans as slaves for Hispaniola, not to find the mythical fountain of youth
-
Woodrow Wilson, known as a progressive leader, was in fact a white supremacist who personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations
- The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts
From the truth about Columbus's genocidal voyages to an honest evaluation of our national leaders, Loewen revives our history, restoring to it the vitality and relevance it truly possesses.
Lies My Teacher Told Me was the winner of "The Before Columbus Foundation/American Book Award" and "The Oliver C. Cox Anti-Racism Award of the American Sociological Association."
About the Author
James Loewen is Professor of sociology at the University of Vermont. He co-wrote the first integrated state-history textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change.
He also created The Truth about Columbus, a subversively true posterbook, which like Lies My Teacher Told Me stemmed from two years of research on American history textbooks at the Smithsonian Institution.
See also:
Professor Loewen's site:
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/index.html
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