Lies My Teacher Told Me (young Readers Edition)

Sociologist James W. Loewen wrote the original Lies My Teacher Told Me after observing how poorly his college students understood U.S. history despite having studied it in high school. For the 1995 first edition, he reviewed a dozen American history textbooks; for the 2007 second edition, he reviewed half a dozen newer ones. This Young Readers' Edition draws from the 2007 edition with updated facts and a more accessible style. Throughout, Loewen compares what textbooks tell students against what historians and social scientists know, arguing that textbooks distort the past by omitting uncomfortable truths and promoting a sanitized, nationalistic version of American history.

Loewen begins with "heroification," his term for turning real people into flawless figures stripped of complexity. His case studies are Helen Keller, a deafblind activist, and Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Most Americans know Keller only as a girl who learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Textbooks ignore the rest of Keller's life, during which she became a committed socialist, helped create the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Keller's radicalism grew from research showing that blindness disproportionately affected the poor. Textbooks avoid her adult life, Loewen argues, because it raises the uncomfortable subject of social class. Wilson's textbook portrait is equally distorted: It omits his record of sending troops to Latin America more often than any other president, his white supremacist policies, his segregation of the federal government, and his praise of the racist film The Birth of a Nation, which spurred the reestablishment of the Ku Klux Klan. Heroification, Loewen argues, prevents students from understanding cause and effect in history.

Turning to Christopher Columbus, Loewen contends that textbooks omit four critical areas: pre-Columbian voyages to the Americas, the European social changes that enabled conquest, Columbus's own conduct, and the consequences of contact. He surveys evidence for earlier arrivals, including Norse settlements and West African expeditions, and identifies six European developments that made conquest possible, from military technology to diseases unknown in the Americas. He dismantles myths including the flat-earth fable and Columbus dying poor. On Columbus's treatment of the Arawak people, Loewen documents enslavement, the cutting off of noses and ears for minor offenses, and the encomienda system of forced labor. The destruction of Native populations led Europeans to turn to the transatlantic African slave trade. He also discusses the Columbian exchange, the two-way flow of crops, animals, diseases, and ideas across the Atlantic.

Loewen challenges the mythologized Thanksgiving narrative, pointing out that one-third of the United States was Spanish territory longer than it has been American and that the first non-Native settlers were enslaved Africans brought to South Carolina in 1526. A plague beginning in 1617, spread by European fishermen, killed 90 to 96% of coastal New England's Native population before the Pilgrims arrived. The Pilgrims settled not in a wilderness but in Patuxet, a depopulated village of the Wampanoag, the local Native nation. Squanto, the village's sole survivor who had been kidnapped and enslaved in Spain, became essential to the colony's survival. The Thanksgiving holiday was not established until 1863, and the Pilgrims were not commonly known as "the Pilgrims" until the 1870s.

The book argues that textbooks present Native American history through a Eurocentric lens. Loewen documents how the fur and slave trades created Native dependence on European goods, how warfare destabilized communities, and how Europeans enslaved Natives across the continent. He highlights the Iroquois League, a confederacy of Native nations, and its influence on American democracy. Colonial leader Benjamin Franklin drew on the Iroquois model for his Albany Plan of Union, a proposal to unite the colonies, and the Continental Congress, the governing body of the colonies during the Revolution, also referenced Iroquois ideas. Loewen covers fraudulent land acquisitions as well, including the Louisiana Purchase, in which the United States bought France's claim to territory France did not own without consulting Native inhabitants.

On race, Loewen argues that white supremacy is the most important yet least visible theme in American history. He traces how Europeans gradually came to view Africans as inferior to justify enslaving them and documents how slavery drove territorial expansion and undercut democratic ideals. He critiques textbook treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, declared the government was founded "on the white basis" (112), yet textbooks omit his racism. Loewen details the nadir of race relations from 1890 to 1940: Southern states stripped African Americans of voting rights, lynchings reached record levels, and sundown towns, communities that excluded Black people after dark, spread nationwide. He connects this history to present-day inequality in income, wealth, and life expectancy.

Loewen pairs this analysis with an examination of antiracism, focusing on abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln. Brown's trial speeches and letters, which shifted national conversation about slavery, appear in almost no textbooks. Lincoln receives similar erasure: Textbooks favor his 1862 letter stating his goal was to save the Union but omit his next sentence expressing his wish that all people could be free. His Second Inaugural Address, identifying slavery as the war's cause, appears substantively in only one of eighteen textbooks.

On social class, Loewen reports that not one textbook listed terms like class structure or inequality in its index. He presents data showing the richest 1% of households owned 40% of national wealth in 2017 and argues that avoiding the subject perpetuates the myth of meritocracy.

Loewen critiques the government's portrayal in textbooks, contrasting the "international good guy" view in high-school texts with realpolitik, the perspective that foreign policy serves national self-interest. He lists six U.S. attempts to undermine foreign governments, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-engineered 1953 coup in Iran, and finds textbook coverage inadequate. He also notes that no textbook mentions the CIA's repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. On civil rights, Loewen argues that textbooks credit the government for achievements the Black community forced on it from the bottom up, while omitting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to destroy civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

On the Vietnam War, Loewen identifies five iconic photographs that defined public perception of the conflict and finds that most textbooks use none of them. He details the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which U.S. troops killed 400 civilians, and argues that textbooks treat it as an isolated incident rather than part of a pattern. He lists several possible interpretations of why the United States fought in Vietnam but finds that most textbooks dodge the question entirely.

Loewen introduces the Kiswahili concepts of sasha (the recent past still in living memory) and zamani (the distant past known through documents) to explain why textbooks devote decreasing space to recent decades. Applying this framework to the 9/11 attacks, he finds that textbooks describe what happened but fail to explain why. He quotes a CIA official and a Pentagon report agreeing that terrorists targeted U.S. policies, not American freedoms, contradicting President George W. Bush's public explanation.

The book challenges the archetype of progress that runs through American history textbooks. Loewen introduces the tragedy of the commons, the idea that shared resources are exploited for private profit, to frame environmental degradation and argues that the current crisis of fossil fuel dependence and global warming is unprecedented. Only two of six newer textbooks mention climate change at all.

In his final chapter, Loewen evaluates traditional history teaching and finds it failing: Students rank history as their least favorite subject, and most cannot place the Civil War in the correct half-century. He reveals that publishers hire freelance writers who may have no background in history to produce textbooks and argues for approaches that present competing interpretations and connect history to students' lives. In an afterword, he offers five questions readers can ask about any historical source and urges young people to become independent learners who use accurate history to support positive change.