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.