Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus

Poster. By James W. Loewen. 2006. Booklet, 48 pp. Poster, 32.5″ x 21″
Graphic corrective to the Columbus story told in many American classrooms.

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In Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong, James Loewen, the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, offers a graphic corrective to the Columbus story told in so many American classrooms. The poster and accompanying paperback book sum up the mis-tellings—and reveal the real story—in a graphic and accessible format.

The poster juxtaposes short quotes from a range of high school textbooks currently in use today, with excerpts from primary sources that clearly show how textbooks have “lied” by knowingly substituting crowd-pleasing myths for grim and gruesome historical evidence.

In fact, these textbooks intentionally omitted every important detail that we do know about Columbus’s fateful voyage to the Americas. Among countless other facts, Loewen demonstrates that Columbus and his men were far from the first to set foot in the “New World,” and that the peoples he encountered there did not submit to the “god-like” authority of him and his crewmen, but rather to the deadly forms of smallpox and bubonic plague they brought with them from Europe.

In concise prose, Loewen expands on these little-discussed facts, putting them in the larger context of a discussion of “truth” and revisionist history. Originally published as The Truth About Columbus. [Description from the publisher.]

Published by The New Press.

ISBN: 9781565840089