James Loewen - Lies My Teacher Told Me

U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi – but neither is it exceptionally less violent. The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
- James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

Two weeks ago, the British newsmagazine The Economist included in their book review section a collection of history books that had recently made Amazon.com’s bestseller lists. All were published in the last year or so, still riding their respective waves of hype that come with the release of an interesting and/or revealing book about history. All, that is, except one: Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, was published in 1996. (That’s eleven years ago, for the statistically-challenged.) Yet as of February 20th, 2007, this book was the 705th top selling book on Amazon.com (out of about three million). So, being especially susceptible to peer pressure and always eager to catch my know-it-all teachers spreading false information, I immediately obtained a copy and read it, trying not to think of just how far behind the times I am.

All in all, it is a light and fast read, the 300-odd pages filled mostly with facts and anecdotes obtained by Loewen, a professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont, through psychotic amounts of research (there are 56 pages of footnotes!). After surveying twelve standard American History high school textbooks, Loewen found what he thought to be a plethora of facts and representations of historical events that were vague, biased, and just plain wrong. Taking on the accepted history of our country in chronological fashion, from Columbus to Clinton, Loewen leaves no stone unturned and no American hero unsullied in his quest for historical and political correctness.

And I must admit, most of Loewen’s accounts are fascinating. From Squanto to Quantrill, Lies contains so many enthralling stories that it is difficult to put down, even when I felt like I was being needlessly pummeled by the same general point over and over. The most important observation he makes is this: the whitewashed, moral-laden history taught to children in schools today isn’t just misleading, it is boring. When heroes are one-dimensional and conflicts are black-and-white, who can blame students for not being interested? People in Loewen’s history are conflicted and flawed, and no grand or celebrated event is safe from the author’s muckraking mission as he seeks to find a less-than-noble cause for, say, Columbus’ voyage or Emancipation. The narrative is genuinely entertaining and enlightening, if you can overlook a handful of embellished and overly PC passages as Loewen gets carried away with his own search for a new version of the truth.

It’s probably worth your time just for the trivia. For instance, not one high school textbook mentions that, when Lincoln was assassinated, 7 million people showed up across the country to watch his funeral train go by. That number is even more astounding when you know that there were only about 20 million people in the Union at that point. One out of every three people traveled to wherever the train was passing just to pay their respects to Lincoln. The book is full of little eye-opening facts like that, and even readers who aren’t looking for a ‘big picture’ moral will be sure to find some worth in Lies, ironically, as a sort of history textbook.

If you read this book, I can almost guarantee it will make you angry. Some people will be outraged at the horrific atrocities committed against minorities (funny how that works) perpetrated by white America, while some will be equally angry at the villanizing of our national heroes. Both are valid. But it shouldn’t keep the reader from absorbing all there is to be learned from Loewen’s history. While the book has a definite liberal bent, the truly open minded and intellectually humble on both sides of the ideological divide should find compelling reasons to change their way of thinking, at least on some specific event in US history. While Loewen is prone is to exaggeration, his passion is tempered by the simple fact that most readers intelligent enough to want to read this book will be able to pick out when and how badly Loewen is exaggerating, and when in fact he is merely stating the facts. (The author himself admits as much in the afterword.) The specific misinterpretations of the twelve textbooks are not the issue, in any case, for who really remembers anything they learned in high school history anyway? The point is that ethnocentrism, fed by rampant half-truths and non sequitur history, is a monstrous worldview that can easily overtake our Christian tolerance toward the neighbors, down the street or across the border. And that is an issue not easily dismissed, not even after eleven years.

Note: There is a 2005 updated edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me, although the 1996 version still sells five times as many copies as the reissue for whatever reason. This review is of the original edition.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is also available at Powells Books.The 1996 version is here. The 2005 version is here.