Lies my teacher told me : everything your American history textbook got wrong

Summary: Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times in the summer of 2006. For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be "objective." What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls "an extremely convincing plea for truth in education." In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should--and could--be taught to American students.

Record details

ISBN: 9781620973929
ISBN: 1620973928
ISBN: 9781620974674
ISBN: 1620974673
ISBN: 0781620974551
Physical Description: print
xxix, 446 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Publisher: New York : The New Press, [2018]
Copyright: ©2018

Content descriptions

General Note:	The preface (©2018) states that the only new words in this 2018 publication are in the preface. Previous copyright dates listed on title page verso are 1995 and 2007.
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Introduction: Something has gone very wrong -- Handicapped by history : the process of hero-making -- 1493 : the true importance of Christopher Columbus -- The truth about the first Thanksgiving -- Red eyes -- "Gone with the wind" : the invisibility of racism in American history textbooks -- John Brown and Abraham Lincoln : the invisibility of antiracism in American history textbooks -- The land of opportunity -- Watching Big Brother : what textbooks teach about the federal government -- See no evil : choosing not to look at the War in Vietnam -- Down the memory hole : the disappearance of the recent past -- Progress is our most important product -- Why is history taught like this? -- What is the result of teaching history like this? -- Afterword: The future lies ahead--and what to do about them.