After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, James W. Loewen has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.
I finally picked up Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (an earlier edition than the one pictured above), which has been sitting on my shelf for years. As a writer, I haven’t been reading enough non-fiction. So I started a non-fiction read that I can really get into.
Loewen’s thesis is that the way history is taught is too loaded down with factoids, not built up enough with drama— I know that my high-school history was taught that way. I hated it. It wasn’t until years after I graduated high school that I began to discover history, because history is full of drama. Never are our historical figures as one-dimensional as we try to make them appear. They are never pure “heroes” or “villains,” but rather deep, realistic characters, full of conflict. And Loewen delves deep into those conflicts.
I’m hooked.
Today’s teaser, from page 233 (randomly selected by Random.org)— Yes, these are long sentences I chose for my teaser, longer than the book’s average, though the book does require brain cells.
The institution at which I taught, Tougaloo College, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to “neutralize” the entire college, in part because its students had sponsored “out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and lectures . . . [and] condemned various publicized injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi.”
[ . . . ]
[Textbooks] omit not only the FBI’s campaign against the civil rights movement, but also its break-ins and undercover investigations of church groups, organizations promoting changes in U.S. policy in Latin America, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
Sounds like a good book about an interesting subject. I’m actually kind of surprised (and gratified) to learn that they’re still teaching history in high school. Excellent teaser!
I really enjoyed reading that book several years ago. I went on a mini history binge, focusing a lot on presidents. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris probably remains my favorite.
I know exactly what you mean, Tim.
I find I learn so much about history when I read and watch historical fiction. It’s “show, don’t tell,” isn’t it? *That’s* how to teach history.