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 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.
