Reader Score
79%
79% of readers
recommend this book
"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.
James W. Loewen (1942-2021) was the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Sundown Towns, and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition (all from The New Press). He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.
Jon Schwarz is a writer.
I love the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by the late James Loewen. But I also love this joke. https://t.co/aypfMFzkBO https://t.co/YqsuQx0OFh
"James Loewen analyzes the flaws in a dozen major U.S. history textbooks and provides a sharper retelling of the moments those textbooks distorted."
Operative of the NDN Agency. All opinions and views are psychological projections on your part. Listuguj Mi'gmaw. straight. cis. student. display:@inde_milou
@ls_gibson I feel like maybe a good prerequisite or preparatory work to having this kind of work land well with the public would be something about the education system's role in perpetuating these mythic narrative structures, like James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me."
Praise for Lies My Teacher Told Me:
"Powerful . . . it serves as a crucial counter-textbook to provide a more realistic and critical narrative about the American past."
--Truthdig
"A treat to read and a serious critique of American education."
--Award Citation, American Book Award
"Remarkable."
--USA Today
"A lively critique."
--The New York Times
"Honest and well-written."
--Harper's Magazine
"Loewen's book contains so much history that it ends up functioning not just as a critique, but also as a kind of counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past."
--The Nation
"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