"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.
