Lies my teacher told me chapter 13

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. - HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY Chapter 2. - 1493 Chapter 3. - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING Chapter 4. - RED EYES Chapter 5. - “GONE WITH THE WIND” Chapter 6. - JOHN BROWN AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN Chapter 7. - THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Chapter 8. - WATCHING BIG BROTHER Chapter 9. - SEE NO EVIL Chapter 10. - DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Chapter 11. - PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT Chapter 12. - WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS? Chapter 13. - WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY LIKE THIS? AFTERWORD NOTES APPENDIX INDEX Copyright Page

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus

The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White

Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles Sallis et al.)

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History

Social Science in the Courtroom

Sundown Towns:

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Dedicated to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks (and their ranks are growing)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE PEOPLE LISTED BELOW in alphabetical order talked with me, commented on chapters, suggested sources, corrected my mistakes, or provided other moral or material aid. I thank them very much. They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, James Baker, Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill Bigelow, Michael Blakey, Linda Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown, Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N. Current, Pete Daniel, Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon, Ariel Dorfman, Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel Gabler, James Gardiner, John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick Hagopian, William Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Mark Hilgendorf, Richard Hill, Mark Hirsch, Dean Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J. Morgan Kousser, Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Garet Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer, Deborah Menkart, Donna Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Roger Norland, Jeff Nygaard, Jim O’Brien, Wardell Payne, Mark Pendergrast, Larry Pizer, Bernice Reagon, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy, Roy Rozensweig, Harry Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter, Saul Schniderman, Barry Schwartz, John Anthony Scott, Louis Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David Shiman, Beatrice Siegel, Barbara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr, Mark Stoler, Bill Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan Van Sertima, Herman Viola, Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara Woods, Nancy Wright, and John Yewell.

Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution awarded me two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its staff provided lively intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows at the National Museum of American History. Interns at the Smithsonian from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and especially Portland State University chased down errant facts. The flexible University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to work on this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New Press, André Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane Wachtell, provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

TO THE SECOND EDITION

AS I ENDURED THE MORAL and intellectual torture of subjecting myself to six new high school American history textbooks in 2006-07, the following assisted in important ways: Cindy King, David Luchs, Susan Luchs, Natalie Martin, Jyothi Natarajan, the Life Cycle Institute and Department of Sociology at Catholic University of America, and Joey the guide dog in training. Many of the folks thanked for their assistance with the first edition—including those at The New Press—also helped this time. So did Amanda Patten at Simon & Schuster.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE SECOND EDITION

I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the room.

—HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT1

I just wanted to let you know that I don’t consider Lies My Teacher Told Me outdated; I really don’t see much improvement in textbooks at all!

—HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, SHERWOOD, AR2

I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I thought it was right on. —WORKER, BAYER PHARMACEUTICALS, BERKELEY, CA3

READERS NEW TO Lies My Teacher Told Me should go straight to page one. This introduction tells old friends (and enemies?) how this edition differs from the first and why it came to be. Since it came to be largely because reader response to the first edition was so positive, the introduction seems self- congratulatory to me—another reason to skip it. Lies My Teacher Told Me does take readers on a voyage of discovery through our past, however, and some readers may want to learn of the reactions of fellow passengers.

From the first day, readers made Lies a success. As its name implies, The New Press was a small fledgling publisher without an advertising budget; word of

mouth caused Lies to sell. The book first created a stir on the West Coast. “Although the book is considered controversial by some, libraries in Alameda County [California] can’t keep it on their shelves,” reported an article at California State University at Hayward. A high school student wrote to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner: “I was a poor (D-plus) student in history until I read People’s History of the United States and Lies My Teacher Told Me. After reading those two books, my GPA in history rose to 3.8 and stayed there. If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.” 4 An early review in the San Francisco Chronicle called Lies “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education,” and my book spent several weeks on the Bay Area bestseller list in 1995.5

Independent bookstores—the kind whose owners and clerks read books and whose customers ask them for recommendations—spread the buzz across North America. “Turns American history upside down,” wrote “Joan” of Toronto in 1995 in a column called “Best New Books Recommended by Leading Independent Bookstores.” “A landmark book,” she went on, “a must read, not only for teachers of history and those who write it, but for any thinking individual.” 6 The Nation, a national magazine, said that Lies “contains so much history that it ends up functioning not just as a critique but also as a kind of counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past.” Soon Lies reached the bestseller lists in Boston; Burlington, Vermont; and other cities. It was also a bestseller for the History and Quality Paperback Book Clubs. In paperback, Lies has gone through more than thirty printings at Simon & Schuster. From the launch of Amazon.com, Lies has been the sales leader in its category (historiography). So, as far as I can tell, Lies is the bestselling book by a living sociologist.7 Counting all editions, including Recorded Books, sales of the first edition totaled about a million copies.

I wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me partly because I believed that Americans took great interest in their past but had been bored to tears by their high school American history courses. Readers’ reactions confirmed this belief. Their responses were not only wide, but deep. “My history classes in high school, I found, were not important to me or my life,” e-mailed one reader from the San Francisco area, because they “did not make it relevant to what was happening today.” Some adult readers had always blamed themselves for their lack of interest in high school history. “For all these years (I am forty-nine), I have had the opinion that I don’t like history,” wrote a woman from Utah, “when in truth,

http://Amazon.com
what I don’t like is illogic, or inconsistency. Thank you for your work. You have changed my life.”

Many readers found the book to be a life-changing experience. A forklift operator in Ohio, a forty-seven-year-old housewife in Denver, a “do-gooder” in upstate New York were inspired to finish college or graduate school and change careers by reading this book. “Words cannot describe how much your book has changed me,” wrote a woman from New York City. “It’s like seeing everything through new eyes. The eyes of truth as I like to call it.” While readers repeat adjectives like “shocked,” “stunned,” and “disillusioned,” many have also found Lies to be uplifting.

To be sure, not every reaction was positive. Although one reader “never could decide whether you were a Socialist or a Republican,” others thought they could and that Lies suffers from a leftward bias. “Marxist/hippie/socialist/ anti- American/anti-Christian” commented one reader at Amazon.com, who would be shocked to learn my real feelings about capitalism. “What a piece of racist trash,” said an anonymous postcard from El Paso. “Take your sour mind to Africa where you can adjust that history.”