![]() ![]() It says you don't need to protest you don't need to write your congressman you don't need to do any of the things that citizens do, because everything's getting better all the time.Īnd then the other part about it is the enormous textbooks. Īnd the second part is what it does to the high school student. And what I mean by that is the overall theme of American history is we started out great and we've been getting better ever since kind of automatically. Usually when I'm asked, "What's the biggest lie?" I put my hand out in front of me slanting upward and to the right. The book is called Lies My Teacher Told Me. And that's what got me so interested in American history as a weapon. And that it had been used against my students. That whole escapade proved to me that history can be a weapon. District Court found for Loewen and the textbook was adopted for several years. Why dwell on it now?" And the judge said, "Well, it is a history book." ![]() The judge - who was an white Mississippian, but a man of honor - took over the questioning, and he said, "But that happened, didn't it? Didn't Mississippi have more lynchings than any other state?" And Turnipseed said, and again I quote, "Well, yes, but that all happened so long ago. Turnipseed is on the stand and he says: "Now, you know, some ninth-graders, especially black male ninth-graders, are pretty big, and I worried that teachers, especially white lady teachers, would have trouble controlling their classes with material like this in the book." And ironically almost none do to this day. Now, our textbook at that time was the only textbook in America that included a photo of a lynching. And he had us turn to page where there's a photo of a lynching. The assistant attorney general for the state of Mississippi asked why he had voted against our book. Let's say it had a dramatic moment, and that came when John Turnipseed was on the stand. The lawsuit had a "Perry Mason" moment - only your older listeners will understand what that is. So you set out to write your own textbook, didn't you? So I thought to myself, "My gosh, what must it do to you to believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history, they screwed up?" It was white supremacist Democrats - indeed, it was the original Ku Klux Klan. But they were too soon out of slavery and so they screwed up and white folks had to take control again."Ī third lie would be, whites didn't take control. I had 17 new students in my new second semester seminar and I didn't want to do all the talking the first day of class so I asked them, "OK, what is Reconstruction? What comes to your mind from that period?"Īnd what happened to me was an aha experience, although you might better consider it an oh-no experience: 16 out of my 17 students said, "Well, Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states. My first full-time teaching job was at a black college, Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.Ĭan you take me back to the original inspiration for the book? What that does, I hope, is signal to every reader of the book: Yes, there are such things as facts here. There's all kinds of grass and gaps that you see in the Trump photo. And you just look at those two photos and they're completely different. He tells NPR, "I started out the new edition with the famous two photographs of the inaugural crowds of this guy named President Obama, his first inauguration, and this guy named President Trump, his first and maybe only inauguration. In a new edition out this summer, James Loewen - now professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont - is championing the cause of critical thinking in the age of fake news. ![]() The book has racked up many awards and sold around 2 million copies since it was first published in 1995. In doing so, Lies My Teacher Told Me overturned one assumption embedded in the history classes I'd been sitting through all my life: that the United States is constantly ascending from greatness to greatness. It introduced me to concepts that still help me make sense of the world, like the "racial nadir" - the downturn in American race relations, starting after Reconstruction, that saw the rise of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, explained how history textbooks got the story of America wrong, usually by soft-pedaling, oversimplifying and burying the thorny drama and uncertainties of the past under a blanket of dull, voice-of-God narration. Slim in contrast to our hulking required textbook, it was a funny, compelling, even shocking read. When I was a high school junior in New Orleans taking AP American history, my teacher assigned us a paperback book. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Lies My Teacher Told Me Subtitle Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Author James W. ![]()
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