Lies My Teacher Told Me

Rating:
Summary: Great book.
Review: Great book. Fascinating. Also, truly scare how so much of American history has be "erased" or "avoided."

Rating:
Summary: A Right Wing Point of View
Review: Loewen has been accused of being liberal, but one rarely ever hears the term conservative or right wing except when liberals are being attacked and of course liberals are ALWAYS ATTACKED FIRST by right wingers. The assumption then is that right wing is normal and natural while liberal is abnormal and deserves to be debunked. But if right wing is normal and natural, why then all the hysteria when one book comes out with a supposedly liberal assessment of history? Furthermore, right wingers connect liberal with meaning anti-white which is clear from the reviews above when Loewen himself is neither liberal nor anti-white. Worse still, the right wingers ALWAYS defend their position (which is curious because normal and natural are by definition indefensible) in terms of ATTACKING non-whites whom they curiously link with liberals!

Read Loewen and then read Zinn not because they're liberal but because you want to know the truth that has been assiduously withheld from you to keep you in fealty to a system of sexism and racism and democratic classism.

Rating:
Summary: I Want the Truth!
Review: American history is often ranked by high school students as one of their least favorite courses. Even in college, very few students take a course in history unless it's a requirement for graduation. The subject of U.S. history is often criticized for being boring and even sleep- inducing by people of all ages.

Author James Loewen feels one of the main reasons for the dislike of history is the way it is presented in textbooks. In this book, he points out the many falsehoods that are commonly printed in our American history books. American history, at the high school level, has to be taught (according to school boards and others in charge) in a non- offensive way. There is also pressure from certain groups to make leaders of the past into larger than life heroes and to avoid most any form of negativity. This is why our American history textbooks are often so bland and why students have such a difficult time finding anything interesting to say about this subject.

Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the early American founders are among the many topics covered in this book. Loewen shows how and why these and other topics are often misrepresented in our children's classrooms. In an effort to remain as politically correct as possible, most anything of a controversial nature or anything that makes the United States look bad is purged from the text. Only at the college level is this trend reversed but according to Loewen, by this time, students are usually so turned off that they don't want to take another history class again.

Most of the pages of this book are spent debunking old myths about history and explaining the brutal way that Native Americans and African American were often treated in the past. The reason Loewen emphasizes these areas so much is because virtually nothing is said about them in high school textbooks. Again, the people in charge feel that this type of information makes the United States look bad and tarnishes the images of our leaders. Thus, they delete most any mention of these topics from the books.

This book is a pretty good one, but the discussions will bother traditionalists and others who would rather live in a fantasy world and pretend that these things never took place and that the United States government is perfect in every way. But for the rest of us, this is an enjoyable read that gets you to re-think what you were told in high school history class as you fought the urge to doze off.