Book Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Written by James W. Loewen in 1995; 3rd edition released in 2018

Synopsis: History and sociology professor James Loewen critically examined twelve of the most popular American history textbooks. He found their content to be oversimplified and nationalistic to the point of being inaccurate (and boring!), failing to present history as an ongoing debate relevant for students today. Half of Lies gives a full, nuanced treatment to major periods in American history, while the rest of the book shows how implicit and explicit cultural agendas have distorted history textbooks and why educational reform has proven so difficult.

Review: I concur with other reviewers that every American citizen age 18 and above should read this book.

Loewen follows my Goldberg Gold Standard of Arguments: He gives a fair treatment of multiple perspectives, then doesn’t just explain why he believes others are wrong but also how they’ve come to hold those positions. Lies is not just revisionist history with a leftist agenda. It’s a plea by a concerned teacher who’s watched a generation of students make it to college stuffed with memorized facts about the War of 1812 and no understanding of Vietnam, students who aren’t even properly taught about America’s strengths despite being aggressively shielded from its hypocrisies.

There are some obvious culprits. Loewen has acted on his values, writing a more accurate Mississippi textbook rather than just calling out others’ flaws, and he places the example of his book being shut down by the state’s school boards within a nationwide pattern of officials and parents explicitly fighting to keep history bright and white. But Loewen doesn’t point fingers so much as splay his hands at systemic issues.  In incisive, documentary-like chapters, he gives sobering statistics on overworked teachers who themselves didn’t study history in college, blatant plagiarism and fact-checking failures by publishers trying to turn a profit, historians who lend their name to the covers of textbooks they neither wrote nor reviewed, and self-censorship from all parties out of an outdated fear of appearing Marxist. The resulting history education is a bland folk tale that leaves many students, myself included, baffled when we learn anything real about other cultures and our own.

The actual history Loewen presents is fascinating, backed in nearly every sentence by primary and secondary sources. I would’ve loved in high school to hear the full story of Squanto, the helpful Indian from the Thanksgiving story. Most textbooks just say he learned English from fishermen; Loewen charts his course being sold into slavery in Spain, escaping to England, convincing colonists to bring him home, and then prudently casting his lot with the Pilgrims after finding that his entire village had been wiped out by smallpox in his absence. If that makes anyone defensive about a beloved American tradition, it’s also worth noting Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today was spearheaded by Lincoln to boost patriotism during the Civil War, relatively recently for a holiday about our founding. 

Lies makes clear that the history of our history is deeply important and relevant to navigating today’s challenges. Here is a history textbook that fills in the gaps we didn’t know we had and that teaches readers to think critically about how we interpret imperfect historical evidence, as my high school textbook should have.

Strength/Weakness: If your interest is just in learning accurate history and less in discussing education and historiography, you can skip Chapters 1, 12, and 13 and still get a full book. 

Rating: 20/20 interventions in Latin America

Ideal Setting: Read this.