Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen.

4/5 rating. 318 pages.

Book #10 of 2022. Read February 4, 2022.

This is about the issues with how history is taught – the serious flaws, how this impacts students, and how we can begin to fix this.

I picked this up because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t passing on lies to my students – this is all about history, so I’m at least not ruining them with these lies. Reading through this book was apropos to the various conversations about what we should teach our kids about our history. James does an amazing job of laying out many things that I didn’t learn in school: the horrors of some of our venerated “heroes”, the atrocities perpetrated by the US, and the mythologies created by textbooks. Reading this, you might assume that he’s some leftist who hates the US. On the contrary, James wants to empower us by giving us the context of history. He wants to stop heroizing people and present them as merely humans – people who have made heroic acts, but also are not perfect. This allows us to have frank and fruitful conversations about the past, and therefore, apply these to the present.

As Frederick Douglass said: “He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” We need to arm our kids with the knowledge of what truly happened in our past. American history classes should not be a place for patriotic chest-thumping! The US has done a lot of good in the world while also ruining lives, and having done a lot of bad. It is much too simple to just show one side or the other – and history is much more complex than that. “Thomas Jefferson surely had it right when he urged the teaching of political history so that Americans might learn ‘how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom.’ Citizens who are their own historians, willing to identify lies and distortions and able to use sources to determine what really went on in the past, become a formidable force for democracy.”

Every person who wants to voice their opinion on what history we teach in schools should read this first. It was dense and not always an easy-read, but definitely was a hugely thought-provoking book that I enjoyed.

Quotes:

“Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character.”

“Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. ‘Take a look in your history book, and you’ll see why we should be proud,’ goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside. The titles themselves tell the story: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule. And you can tell history textbooks just from their covers, graced as they are with American flags, bald eagles, the Statue of Liberty.”

“History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learned.”

“By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves….We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.” – Charles V. Willie

“We teach [Helen] Keller as an ideal, not a real person, to inspire our young people to emulate her. Keller becomes mythic figure, the ‘woman who overcame’ – but for what? There is no content! Just look what she accomplished, we’re exhorted – yet we haven’t a clue as to what that really was.”

“Ironically, [Woodrow] Wilson was widely despised in the 1920s, and it was only after World War II that he came to be viewed kindly by policymakers and historians.”

“We don’t want complicated icons.”

“Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals.”

“The sources are perfectly clear about Columbus’s motivation: in 1495, for instance, Michele de Cuneo wrote about accompanying Columbus on his 1494 expedition into the interior of Haiti: ‘After we had rested for several days in our settlement, it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.’”

“It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit.”

“Almost half of all major crops now grown throughout the world originally came from the Americas.”

“This theft impoverishes us, keeps us ignorant of what has caused the world to develop as it has. Clearly our textbooks are not about teaching history. Their enterprise is Building Character. They therefore treat Columbus as an origin myth: He was good and so are we.”

“Columbus’s conquest of Haiti can be seen as an amazing feat of courage and imagination by the first of many brave empire builders. It can also be understood as a bloody atrocity that left a legacy of genocide and slavery that endures in some degree to this day. Both views of Columbus are valid: indeed, Columbus’s importance in history owes precisely to his being both a heroic navigator and a great plunderer.”

“Readers might be fascinated if textbook authors presented two or more of the various possibilities, but, as usual, exposing students to historical controversy is taboo. Each textbook picks just one reason and presents it as fact.”

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.”

“Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies.”

“Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life.”

“Abigail Adams wrote her husband in 1774 to ask how we could ‘fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.’”

“On [the Jefferson Memorial’s] marble walls a carved panel proclaims Jefferson’s boast, ‘I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of men,’ without ever mentioning his participation in racial slavery. Perhaps asking a marble memorial to tell the truth is demanding too much. Should history textbooks similarly be a shrine, however? Should they encourage students to worship Jefferson? Or should they help students understand him, wrestle with the problems he wrestled with, grasp his accomplishments, and also acknowledge his failures?”

“Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major leagues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out. In 1911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they won fifteen of the first twenty-eight derbies.”

“Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes, have completely vanished from our history books.”

“‘The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all,’ The American Tradition assures us. Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because they don’t mean their declaration as a serious statement of comparative history – it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.”

“Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.” – John Brown

“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it – where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why does not another say it does not mean some other man? If that Declaration is not…true, let us tear it out! [Cries of ‘no, no!’] Let us stick to it then, let us stand firmly by it, then.” – Abraham Lincoln

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world.”

“Armed guerrilla actions plagued every Confederate state. (With the exception of Missouri, and the 1863 New York City draft riots, few Union states were afflicted with such problems.)”

“In part owing to these contradictions, some Confederate soldiers switched sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white Southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army opposing Sherman disappeared through desertion.”

“The Chicago Tribune, the most important organ of the Republican party in the Midwest, responded angrily [to the Black Codes passed first in Mississippi after the Civil War]: ‘We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the state of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of the freed waves.’”

“When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system.”

“The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.”

“Nonetheless, no textbook ever mentions the influence of multinationals on U.S. policy. This is the case not necessarily because textbook authors are afraid of offending multinationals, but because they never discuss any influence on U.S. policy. Rather, they present our governmental policies as rational humanitarian responses to trying situations, and they do not seek to penetrate the surface of the government’s own explanation of its actions.”

“Textbooks’ failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors’ apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.”

“Instead, textbooks merely assume that the government tried to do the right thing. Citizens who brace the textbook view would presumably support any intervention, armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective of our legitimate national interests or not, because they would be persuaded that all our policies and interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims.”

“[Then FBI head, J. Edgar] Hoover called [Dr. Martin Luther] King ‘the most notorious liar in the country’ and tried to prove that the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] was infested with communists.”

“In Mississippi alone, civil rights workers endured more than a thousand arrests at the hands of local officials, thirty-five shooting incidents, and six murders. The FBI repeatedly claimed, however, that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not its job.”

“In 1970 Hoover approved the automatic investigation of ‘all black student unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students.’”

“To encounter so little material in school about the bad things the government has done, especially when parents and the daily newspaper tell a different story, ‘makes all education suspect,’ according to Donald Barr.”

“Students need information about the recent past from their high school American history courses. The recent past is, after all, the history with the most immediate impact upon our lives today.”

“In Vietnam that U.S. dropped three times as many explosives as it dropped in all theatres of World War II, even including our nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so textbook authors have many images of bomb damage to choose from.”

“Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, are on record elsewhere as knowing of the importance of My Lai. ‘ The American strategy had atrocity built into it,’ Lytle said to me. Davidson and Lytle devote most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in their book After the Fact. There they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United States. ‘One thing was certain,’ they write, ‘the encounter became a defining moment in the public’s perception of the war.’ Plainly they do not think high school students need to know about it, however, for their high school history textbook, The United States – A History of the Republic, like seven other textbooks in my sample, never mention My Lai.”

“[Muhammad] Ali refused induction into the military, for which his [heavyweight boxing] title was stripped from him, and said, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me “nigger.”‘”

“Textbook authors need not choose sides, either. They could present several interpretations, along with an overview of the historical support for each, and invite students to come to their own conclusions. Such challenges are not the textbook authors’ style, however. They seem compelled to present the ‘right’ answer to all questions, even unresolved controversies.”

“Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to that world.”

“By implying that no real questions about our future need be asked and no real thinking about trends in our history need be engaged in, textbook authors concede implicitly that our history has no serious bearing on our future. We can hardly fault students for concluding that the study of history is irrelevant.”

“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.” – Marc Ferro

“Many history teachers don’t know much history: a national survey of 157 teachers in 1990 revealed that 13 percent had never taken a college history course, and only 40 percent held a B.A. or M.A. in history or had a major with ‘some history’ in it.”

“Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.” – Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

“To succeed, schools must help us learn how to ask questions about our society and its history and how to figure out answers for ourselves.”

“A second question, also part of the sociology of knowledge approach, is to ask whose viewpoint is presented. Where is the speaker, writer, etc., located in social structure? What interests, material or ideological, does the statement serve? Whose viewpoints are omitted?”

“For history is central to our ongoing understanding of ourselves and our society.”

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