The award-winning critique of 12 U.S. history textbooks, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything American History Textbooks Get Wrong, is also available in a young readers’ edition.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen not only critiques textbooks, he also introduces the history as it should be told regarding key events, people, and time periods such as pre-Columbian history, Reconstruction, President Wilson, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War.
True stories — otherwise known as history — need to be told transparently, in all their messy, marvelous, multi-faceted glory. Loewen’s Lies tells the truth to young readers, creating a new crop of critical thinkers and active citizens. —Tanya Lee Stone, NAACP Image Award winner and Sibert medalist
Loewen said of U.S. history textbooks,
Our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly antidemocratic. . . . Such an approach converts textbooks into anti-citizenship manuals — handbooks for acquiescence.
James W. Loewen was the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Read more.
ISBN: 978-1-62097-469-8 | The New Press
Find more books and articles by James Loewen below, and watch this video of social studies teacher Nurin Willis describe the importance that Lies My Teacher Told Me had on them when they read the book in high school.
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