Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
"Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself."
--Howard Zinn
A new edition of the national bestseller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author
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.
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.
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Community Reviews
Preface
Unfortunately the preface reveals a very outdated book here. He uses an example from Mississippi in 1975 to illustrate his point about history being too conservative in USA. Revealing how outdated this book is. He talks about a nationalistic concept of history where heroes are created and their bad sides are not talked about. When I went to school in the 90's Denmark this was not the case anymore. American History already back then was progressive and focused on suffering slaves and Indians and the mean white man. So for me it's hard to imagine some image of an extremely conservative history field in 90's USA. Not that I don't believe the author, I'm just not convinced by his weak arguments. Even back then most media from USA we saw in Europe criticised USA and especially anti-gun and anti-American imperialist documentaries were a huge hit in Europe. Today any American online history channel will go counter to every single claim this author says is uncountered. Just this week I watched many PBS and Extra Credit documentaries. Both series had documentaries that were very pro union and very anti capitalism. Crash Course history is even more progressive. All 3 even have full series about minorities and women and all 3 attack Western historical heroes. This means that progressive history is just one click away and available for free for even people who can't read. Any counter-claim the author presents in the book is presented 1000 times over in media. This great nationalistic history the author talks about is dead and gone in the West and will never reappear. But China, Iran, Russia and Serbia may very well still practise history this way. I wish this book was about ANY of those other countries as it would still be very relevant.
Chapter 1) Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making. The truth about Helen Keller - Socialist, Woodrow Wilson - racist (among other things), Betsy Ross -tourist attraction, etc.
3/5
It's a very well-written chapter and that's surely what made the book a smash hit. Few academics write well. Unfortunately this chapter is also very dated. It's just totally irrelevant critique to current historical textbooks and documentaries. Wilson is in fact described in negative terms in most current popular history texts. And all his negative sides are very well-known by even an ignorant European like myself. Even more so than his positive deeds! So we may have the opposite problem today.
Helen Keller's socialist ideas hidden because socialism is as hated as racism in USA? Nope, that one is painfully untrue today. It's just not the case anymore. Bernie Sanders just ran twice for president and both times was hugely successful and was not far away from winning the Democratic nomination. It's just not factual that socialism is so hated by all USA that historical socialist figures are ignored. At any rate history is the field with most left leaning professors. History professors hiding away socialist ideas because they consider them negative is impossible as they support these ideas more than even sociologists or anthropologists who also are extremely left-leaning.
This chapter is very much outdated critique. I'm sure it was great in 1995 when it was written. But now there are very different historical fights that deserve their own books. Unfortunately very few people are writing this needed critique so I understand why this old book is still popular. We are in desperate need of new critical voices.
Chapter 2) 1493: The True Importance Of Christopher Columbus. From the real 'discoverer' of the New World to the myths about a flat world to the enslavement and extermination of the Arawaks to Columbus' penniless' death.
2/5
This chapter is even more outdated. Columbus's negative sides are very much the second thing anyone learns about him today. "He discovered America… but then not really. And he was a bad guy."
The author also says that we haven't found intelligence differences between ethnic groups. That statement is today considered a falsehood. So his further arguments based on this claim are dated and invalid. Intelligence did have a major role to play in European expansion. Just as it had a big role to play in the later Japanese and now Chinese expansion.
Then the author claims that the hypothetical African discovery of the New World must be added to all textbooks to make African Americans feel like they are part of important history. I get the moral logic behind this point but history wise adding questionable history to textbooks to please a certain group of people seems like a terrible idea. I'll expand on his claims on this issue later on.
He then claims that Vasco da Gama is famous because he is white. That is one huge claim. But he never presents evidence for this claim. He claims that African explorers should be famous too. But he doesn't go into how Europeans wrote down history and Africans not doing so may have made some history historical and some forgotten. I'm not sure his claim of "racist White men" is the most likely explanation for why for example history textbooks don't tell students that Africans maybe discovered America. There is a huge issue of lack of evidence here.
Of course it's a bigger debate. But the problem is that his argument is very accusatory without any good proof for any of his claims. When he does supply evidence it's for claims like Columbus being bad and Vikings having discovered America. But these claims are well accepted by historians. So he is proving what is known and not proving what he claims is true but is not accepted knowledge.
He then makes up a story about a black girl adding to the history class lesson by talking about a rap song and the black people history in it. In his example the white teacher dismisses this girl because "rap is not serious" or by claiming that those black people events are not historically significant. He states that we need to create history textbooks to make minories feel good about themselves. The problem here is that you would need to add questionable events to textbooks just because they are from a certain culture that is currently living in USA. And you similarly don't add events that are from, for example, a Serbian point of view because they are not a large minority group in USA. So what unproven culture myths do you include in US history books? Mexican, American Indian and African only?
This idea for how to write textbooks doesn't really seem logical to me. Surely facts should stand above anything else?
Let's go back to his, Africans in Mexico before Columbus claim. He states that European discoverers saw black people in America. Which means that West African discovery of America is probable. Yet again we move into pure guesswork. We have since done DNA testing on Indians and Indian skeletons and the evidence goes against all of these claims. As further proof of Africans in Mexico he also claims that Olmec head statues in America have clear Negroid features which could illustrate that Negroid people were worshipped by the natives before Europeans arrived. To me it's weird that he only focuses on this African ahistorical theory about the statues. In reality some Chinese people propose that some of these statues have Chinese features and therefore prove Chinese immigration to America. Should we include that narration in textbooks if Chinese people get more numerous in USA despite DNA research countering this claim too?
If we include his myths in textbooks to please African Americans then we are close to including a million other such loose theories. It could easily spell disaster for history as a field if evidence is not the main goal. The modern History Channel with documentaries about aliens and hypothetical Nazi weapons is probably the best example of this kind of wide appeal history made to please the layman viewer. It's an extreme example illustrating that history made to entertain and please can be terrible history.
Yet the chapter is not over and I could mention 10 other such points. He constantly misconstrues history by omission. He starts out by retelling Columbus stories of wars with Indians and Indians who were punished if they didn't pay taxes. Then right away he states that Haiti natives where exterminated in "one of the primary instances of genocide in human history." The problem with his hypothesis is that he alludes to the Spanish whipping out the natives from start to finish as he counts down from 3m (up to 8m) to zero. By telling these stories and then mentioning that the population was genocided the uncritical reader will be mislead. We are made to believe that they just kept killing all the natives they could find. That thinking has one big omission: we know that viruses did most of this work, not humans. So while his points about Spanish cruelty stand it's just not honest to omit this as clearly the Spanish didn't just wipe out "up to 8m" people in one long mass slaughter.
He is rebelling so hard against conservative history that he goes into the completely opposite ideology bias and recreates history to fit into his own biased worldview. Some progressives may think the moral cause here is so important that lies and deceiving readers about historical events is acceptable. But it's still low tier history and it doesn't really deserve a high rating for historical accuracy no matter if you agree with him on the moral claims or not.
I frankly don't think I need to say more about any other chapter here.
My conclusion
This is one of the least historically accurate "history" books I have read. It's not terrible, I just demand a greater focus on facts from history books.
This book is actually a very direct critique of 12, now very old, history textbooks. I like this project idea. I have read 4 amazing studies in psychology on this concept. One was about intelligence science and two about evolutionary psychology in psychology textbooks. These studies found that most textbooks are close to pseudoscience on some of these issues and omit crucial science or mislead readers with falsehoods. The forth study looked into disproven psychology findings in textbooks and discovered that most textbooks still featured science myths. So we know that psychology textbooks are in large worthless pseudoscience. Unless you know how to pick the right one you'll probably pick a terrible textbook. This is essential knowledge for the layman to understand.
But compared to the book those studies went into how they picked the textbooks and stayed the scientific course. This book doesn't do that and he doesn't even tell us what versions he uses or what year they are from. I assume they are all old textbooks? This book is not even close to being as good as any of those studies and I frankly don't trust his conclusions as he doesn't use the scientific method or follow common academic guidelines for research and transparency. Instead he criticizes left and right without showing us stats or evidence besides his personally selected quotes from books.
He often criticizes omissions by just as great omissions. But mostly he uses moral arguments attacking white male culture. Loose moral cultural arguments to me ring hollow 99 out of 100 times so for me this part is not engaging at all.
Obviously he is an amazing writer and storyteller. That itself makes this a book that the wide ignorant public will enjoy. But unfortunately it doesn't hold up to scrutiny and it's too outdated and pointless to read today in either case.
Even if he is completely fair to the history textbooks, which I doubt he is, the answer to bad history is not alternative bad history. It's good history. And this is not it.
Unfortunately the preface reveals a very outdated book here. He uses an example from Mississippi in 1975 to illustrate his point about history being too conservative in USA. Revealing how outdated this book is. He talks about a nationalistic concept of history where heroes are created and their bad sides are not talked about. When I went to school in the 90's Denmark this was not the case anymore. American History already back then was progressive and focused on suffering slaves and Indians and the mean white man. So for me it's hard to imagine some image of an extremely conservative history field in 90's USA. Not that I don't believe the author, I'm just not convinced by his weak arguments. Even back then most media from USA we saw in Europe criticised USA and especially anti-gun and anti-American imperialist documentaries were a huge hit in Europe. Today any American online history channel will go counter to every single claim this author says is uncountered. Just this week I watched many PBS and Extra Credit documentaries. Both series had documentaries that were very pro union and very anti capitalism. Crash Course history is even more progressive. All 3 even have full series about minorities and women and all 3 attack Western historical heroes. This means that progressive history is just one click away and available for free for even people who can't read. Any counter-claim the author presents in the book is presented 1000 times over in media. This great nationalistic history the author talks about is dead and gone in the West and will never reappear. But China, Iran, Russia and Serbia may very well still practise history this way. I wish this book was about ANY of those other countries as it would still be very relevant.
Chapter 1) Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making. The truth about Helen Keller - Socialist, Woodrow Wilson - racist (among other things), Betsy Ross -tourist attraction, etc.
3/5
It's a very well-written chapter and that's surely what made the book a smash hit. Few academics write well. Unfortunately this chapter is also very dated. It's just totally irrelevant critique to current historical textbooks and documentaries. Wilson is in fact described in negative terms in most current popular history texts. And all his negative sides are very well-known by even an ignorant European like myself. Even more so than his positive deeds! So we may have the opposite problem today.
Helen Keller's socialist ideas hidden because socialism is as hated as racism in USA? Nope, that one is painfully untrue today. It's just not the case anymore. Bernie Sanders just ran twice for president and both times was hugely successful and was not far away from winning the Democratic nomination. It's just not factual that socialism is so hated by all USA that historical socialist figures are ignored. At any rate history is the field with most left leaning professors. History professors hiding away socialist ideas because they consider them negative is impossible as they support these ideas more than even sociologists or anthropologists who also are extremely left-leaning.
This chapter is very much outdated critique. I'm sure it was great in 1995 when it was written. But now there are very different historical fights that deserve their own books. Unfortunately very few people are writing this needed critique so I understand why this old book is still popular. We are in desperate need of new critical voices.
Chapter 2) 1493: The True Importance Of Christopher Columbus. From the real 'discoverer' of the New World to the myths about a flat world to the enslavement and extermination of the Arawaks to Columbus' penniless' death.
2/5
This chapter is even more outdated. Columbus's negative sides are very much the second thing anyone learns about him today. "He discovered America… but then not really. And he was a bad guy."
The author also says that we haven't found intelligence differences between ethnic groups. That statement is today considered a falsehood. So his further arguments based on this claim are dated and invalid. Intelligence did have a major role to play in European expansion. Just as it had a big role to play in the later Japanese and now Chinese expansion.
Then the author claims that the hypothetical African discovery of the New World must be added to all textbooks to make African Americans feel like they are part of important history. I get the moral logic behind this point but history wise adding questionable history to textbooks to please a certain group of people seems like a terrible idea. I'll expand on his claims on this issue later on.
He then claims that Vasco da Gama is famous because he is white. That is one huge claim. But he never presents evidence for this claim. He claims that African explorers should be famous too. But he doesn't go into how Europeans wrote down history and Africans not doing so may have made some history historical and some forgotten. I'm not sure his claim of "racist White men" is the most likely explanation for why for example history textbooks don't tell students that Africans maybe discovered America. There is a huge issue of lack of evidence here.
Of course it's a bigger debate. But the problem is that his argument is very accusatory without any good proof for any of his claims. When he does supply evidence it's for claims like Columbus being bad and Vikings having discovered America. But these claims are well accepted by historians. So he is proving what is known and not proving what he claims is true but is not accepted knowledge.
He then makes up a story about a black girl adding to the history class lesson by talking about a rap song and the black people history in it. In his example the white teacher dismisses this girl because "rap is not serious" or by claiming that those black people events are not historically significant. He states that we need to create history textbooks to make minories feel good about themselves. The problem here is that you would need to add questionable events to textbooks just because they are from a certain culture that is currently living in USA. And you similarly don't add events that are from, for example, a Serbian point of view because they are not a large minority group in USA. So what unproven culture myths do you include in US history books? Mexican, American Indian and African only?
This idea for how to write textbooks doesn't really seem logical to me. Surely facts should stand above anything else?
Let's go back to his, Africans in Mexico before Columbus claim. He states that European discoverers saw black people in America. Which means that West African discovery of America is probable. Yet again we move into pure guesswork. We have since done DNA testing on Indians and Indian skeletons and the evidence goes against all of these claims. As further proof of Africans in Mexico he also claims that Olmec head statues in America have clear Negroid features which could illustrate that Negroid people were worshipped by the natives before Europeans arrived. To me it's weird that he only focuses on this African ahistorical theory about the statues. In reality some Chinese people propose that some of these statues have Chinese features and therefore prove Chinese immigration to America. Should we include that narration in textbooks if Chinese people get more numerous in USA despite DNA research countering this claim too?
If we include his myths in textbooks to please African Americans then we are close to including a million other such loose theories. It could easily spell disaster for history as a field if evidence is not the main goal. The modern History Channel with documentaries about aliens and hypothetical Nazi weapons is probably the best example of this kind of wide appeal history made to please the layman viewer. It's an extreme example illustrating that history made to entertain and please can be terrible history.
Yet the chapter is not over and I could mention 10 other such points. He constantly misconstrues history by omission. He starts out by retelling Columbus stories of wars with Indians and Indians who were punished if they didn't pay taxes. Then right away he states that Haiti natives where exterminated in "one of the primary instances of genocide in human history." The problem with his hypothesis is that he alludes to the Spanish whipping out the natives from start to finish as he counts down from 3m (up to 8m) to zero. By telling these stories and then mentioning that the population was genocided the uncritical reader will be mislead. We are made to believe that they just kept killing all the natives they could find. That thinking has one big omission: we know that viruses did most of this work, not humans. So while his points about Spanish cruelty stand it's just not honest to omit this as clearly the Spanish didn't just wipe out "up to 8m" people in one long mass slaughter.
He is rebelling so hard against conservative history that he goes into the completely opposite ideology bias and recreates history to fit into his own biased worldview. Some progressives may think the moral cause here is so important that lies and deceiving readers about historical events is acceptable. But it's still low tier history and it doesn't really deserve a high rating for historical accuracy no matter if you agree with him on the moral claims or not.
I frankly don't think I need to say more about any other chapter here.
My conclusion
This is one of the least historically accurate "history" books I have read. It's not terrible, I just demand a greater focus on facts from history books.
This book is actually a very direct critique of 12, now very old, history textbooks. I like this project idea. I have read 4 amazing studies in psychology on this concept. One was about intelligence science and two about evolutionary psychology in psychology textbooks. These studies found that most textbooks are close to pseudoscience on some of these issues and omit crucial science or mislead readers with falsehoods. The forth study looked into disproven psychology findings in textbooks and discovered that most textbooks still featured science myths. So we know that psychology textbooks are in large worthless pseudoscience. Unless you know how to pick the right one you'll probably pick a terrible textbook. This is essential knowledge for the layman to understand.
But compared to the book those studies went into how they picked the textbooks and stayed the scientific course. This book doesn't do that and he doesn't even tell us what versions he uses or what year they are from. I assume they are all old textbooks? This book is not even close to being as good as any of those studies and I frankly don't trust his conclusions as he doesn't use the scientific method or follow common academic guidelines for research and transparency. Instead he criticizes left and right without showing us stats or evidence besides his personally selected quotes from books.
He often criticizes omissions by just as great omissions. But mostly he uses moral arguments attacking white male culture. Loose moral cultural arguments to me ring hollow 99 out of 100 times so for me this part is not engaging at all.
Obviously he is an amazing writer and storyteller. That itself makes this a book that the wide ignorant public will enjoy. But unfortunately it doesn't hold up to scrutiny and it's too outdated and pointless to read today in either case.
Even if he is completely fair to the history textbooks, which I doubt he is, the answer to bad history is not alternative bad history. It's good history. And this is not it.
I did not like this book. I felt the author was angry and had a strong slant right from the beginning. I did learn several new facts that I hadn’t previously learned but nothing worth buying the book for just really disappointed in this books perception of the educational system and what it’s supposed to do regarding history.
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