“Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read Lies My Teacher Told Me. 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, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 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 of Lies My Teacher Told Me, 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.”
Lies My Teacher Told Me started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks but 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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Lies My Teacher Told Me:
“Powerful . . . it serves as a crucial counter-textbook to provide a more realistic and critical narrative about the American past.”
―Truthdig
“A treat to read and a serious critique of American education.”
―Award Citation, American Book Award
“Remarkable.”
―USA Today
“A lively critique.”
―The New York Times
“Honest and well-written.”
―Harper’s Magazine
“Loewen’s book contains so much history that it ends up functioning not just as a critique, but also as a kind of counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past.”
―The Nation
“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
About the Author
James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, and Sundown Towns, all published by The New Press. He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies. In 2012, the American Sociological Association gave him its Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award; he is the only white person to win this honor. Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont and lives in Washington, D.C.
