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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition | 
 enlarge | Author: James W. Loewen
Publisher: New Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $17.78
You Save: $9.17 (34%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  426 reviews
Sales Rank: 2699
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Rev Upd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 1595583262
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9781595583260
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award, thoroughly updated for the first time since its initial publication to include textbooks written since 2000 and featuring a new chapter on what textbooks get wrong about 9/11 and Iraq.
Since its initial publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has gone on to win an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and to sell one million copies in its various editions.
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" beginning with the pre-Columbian period and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the My Lai massacre.
In this revised and updated edition, James Loewen surveys six new high school history textbooks written since the first edition of Lies was published. In his inimitable style, he adds material to each chapter noting where the new books have gotten more accurate and where they are still fatally flawed. Loewen also writes at length about the way these textbooks treat the 2001 terrorist attacks and our "response" in Iraq. In fact, while researching this new edition Loewen made the front page of the New York Times in 2006 when he discovered that publishers were passing off as original virtually identical passages on important recent events in a number of history books. And in yet another example of the failure of American history textbooks, he found that "celebrity" historians whose names appear as authors in some cases have never read, let alone written, the texts attributed to them.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 421 more reviews...
 More boring than history December 13, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
The author states that history is taught in a boring way. This book is worse than a boring history book. I like the idea of finding out the complete truth of undisclosed facts, like Helen Keller was a communist, but his constant harrang of school book writers gets old faster than the crusades. Telling obscured history, like the vikings may have lived in the New England area long before columbus, is fine and interesting. But then, page after page of criticism of the "subversive" text book industry makes this book unbearable. 10% of the book is interesting, 90% is whinning.
 Simple Facts and Evidence Shows Our Textbooks Need An Overhaul December 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is filled with concrete examples of important details that are left out of history books because they will create controversy and might make students ask questions.
Instead the goal of history has become to bore a student with unrelated and mostly useless facts - that any bored person will do his/her best to avoid. The human brain learns and remembers what is emotionally stimulating. If you tell history as a story with drama then it will tend to stick, "Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick". James W. Loewen
"Study after study shows that students successfully resist learning "facts" like these. Indeed they resist all too well. When two thirds of American seventeen year olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century or 22 percent of my students reply that the `Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea', we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know about. Still less do they learn what caused the major development in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.
Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or reject historical referents used in arguments by candidates for offices, sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss."
IN textbooks the goal seems to be to present history NOT as a human drama of evolving understanding with progress and reversals (one step forward, 2 steps back) - but instead as an ever improving evolution to a better way of life.
Page 172 "Perhaps the most letting critic Frances Fitz Gerald made in her 1979 survery of American history textbooks, America Revised, was that they leave out ideas."
The problems with ideas is that sometimes it can be obvious which ideas are better yet the ones with the right ideas don't always win. It is easier to force memorization of useless facts than the show the students that the world doesn't work as continuous evolving society. The students would ask why. We all know how irritated some adults get when children keep asking why. Especially when they don't know the answer and it is below them to accept that.
His basic message is that our history books are dooming us to repeat our mistakes of the past by forcing us (as a country) to make decisions based on infomercial, or angry racist talk show hosts as we have no background knowledge to make informed decisions. Lack of knowledge means a person can be controlled by using fear of the unknown.
Any kid over the age of 12 will love it December 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This eye-opening book puts multicultural historical interpretation into language that young kids will absolutely love. Although its themes and topics initially seem removed from the curriculum of junior high, Loewen's iconoclastic, glass-smashing approach to history will rivet young readers, most of whom have learned buckets of skepticism by the time they reach middle school. The book strikes a nerve with younger readers precisely because it's one of the first ones they'll pick up that confesses what they've long suspected: adults know that lots of what teachers are teaching is hokum.
If this book title appeals to you, regardless of whether you agree with Loewen, chances are good that you were one of those kids and that even now you receive the official company line with great skepticism. You knew that your textbooks and your teachers were often chock full of horse hockey, but didn't have the ammunition to prove it. Rather than tearing down the accepted canons of U.S. history, however, this book does something that's much more destructive to approved history textbooks and ultimately much more illuminating. It makes an irrefutable case that what's presented as historical fact is often historical interpretation, that the interpretation depends on who's doing the telling, and that the lessons to be learned from the telling almost always depend on whether the teller ended up atop the winner's heap or under the winner's boot.
The Germans like to say that the victor writes the history, but Loewen puts the lie to such apologists by proving that losers write history, too, they just have a lot harder time getting it printed in a school textbook. No question this is a great read, informative, and filled with the kind of attitude that made "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "Captain Underpants" runaway winners for rebels of all ages.
Just Say Know November 12, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Our education system continues to Dumb Down. Knowing the past is key to not repeating mistakes and growing as a society. Someone should have sent this book to Bush/Cheney. It may not have helped but could not have hurt.
Read it!!!!!! November 5, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is so amazing and I recommend it for any person wanting to know some truths about our history. I am a Native American and to read some of Christopher Columbus' journals is appalling. There is an enormous amount of information in this book and as a teacher I think that it's an injustice to keep this to myself.
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