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1.03k reviews for:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
4.04 AVERAGE
1.03k reviews for:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
4.04 AVERAGE
I did not finish this book, I read to about halfway through the fourth chapter and although the topics were interesting the chapters were way too long for me and just kind of droned on!
If you have ever wondered why and how so many Americans think this country was ever great (and why that is bullshit), then read this book. Insightful, disturbing, and humorous. This should be required reading for every citizen.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This is an eye-opening look at how history is presented in high school textbooks. Basically, publishers are afraid of antagonizing conservative white supremacists in places like Florida and Texas, so anything controversial is self-censored. What remains are bland and often misleading (or even completely wrong) books that exist more to promote feelings of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny than to teach history. Cause and effect are often glossed over, resulting in passive text that leads away from critical thinking. Loewen goes through example after example of where standard textbooks fail. Yes, Loewen has an agenda and he very much cherry picks his examples. But every textbook cherry picks what they include and exclude; there is no way to include detailed descriptions of every event. Loewen's goal is to get students to think for themselves and use primary sources rather than be content with the spoon feeding they usually get. As a result, there may be one or two examples that Loewen uses that may not be 100% accurate, but the overall gist is 100% true. I knew a few of the examples going in, so I am confident that the ones I didn't know are essentially correct. And there are plenty of examples that will get readers' attention. You may not like reading them, but that doesn't make them untrue. Loewen also knows that a truer picture of history is vital for understanding the present. We must learn from our mistakes, not hide from them. In today's climate of renewed racial and class discrimination, citizens need to have critical thinking skills more than ever. Are they getting those skills in public schools? Probably not. And that's a big reason the US is facing the political challenges it is.
The black-and-white artwork by Nate Powell is powerful and enhances the text. This is really more of an illustrated textbook than a graphic novel, so don't be misled into thinking this is going to read like a superhero comic.
This is a book every high school student (as well as adults) should read. Unfortunately, the ones who need it the most are probably the least likely to have access (or desire) to read it.
The black-and-white artwork by Nate Powell is powerful and enhances the text. This is really more of an illustrated textbook than a graphic novel, so don't be misled into thinking this is going to read like a superhero comic.
This is a book every high school student (as well as adults) should read. Unfortunately, the ones who need it the most are probably the least likely to have access (or desire) to read it.
Illuminating but sometimes seemed to simplify or present perspectives a little too narrowly. But I appreciated the exposure to some information that I'd never learned or was taught before. This was a book I purchased for one of my college classes--I forget which one now. But not surprising that it was a UCSC class. ;) I don't think I read this in full while in college, so I wanted to read it before putting it in the neighborhood Little Free Library for someone else to pick up and read.
“History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history ‘Iconoclasm I and II,’ because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.” pg. 12
“A host of other reasons—pressure from the ‘ruling class,’ pressure from textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield children from harm or conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers—may help explain why textbooks omit troublesome facts. A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when we’re passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons. ‘People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,’ Helen Keller pointed out. ‘Conclusions are not always pleasant.’ Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are so accustomed to blandness that the textbook or teacher who brought real intellectual controversy into the classroom would strike us as a violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to speak well of the deceased, after all.” pg. 35
“Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most important cause of cultural development. Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthropologists call this phenomenon efflorescence. Children in elementary school learn that Persian and Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity due to their location on trade routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of European world domination, textbooks have a golden opportunity to apply this same idea of cultural diffusion to Europe. They squander it.” pg. 45
“We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon involved), rather than a discovery by one. The term New World is itself part of the problem, for people had lived in the Americas for thousands of years. The Americas were new only to Europeans. The word discover is another part of the problem, for how can one person discover what another already knows and owns? Our textbooks are struggling with this issue, trying to move beyond colonialized history and Eurocentric language.“ pg. 70-71
“Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. According to Langer, ‘Almost everyone, in that medieval time, interpreted the plague as a punishment by God for human sins.’ Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself. The entire culture of Europe was affected: fear, death, and guilt became prime artistic motifs. Milder plagues—typhus, syphilis, and influenza, as well as bubonic—continued to ravage Europe until the end of the seventeenth century.” pg. 78
“While textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black America, they remain largely silent regarding the impact of slavery on white America, North or South. Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans, or with the United States as a whole. Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy part. After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond has mounted an exhibit on slavery that does not romanticize the institution. Without explaining its relevance to the present, however, extensive coverage of slavery is like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff—just more facts for hapless eleventh graders to memorize.
Slavery’s twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery’s enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.” pg. 142-143
“On average, African Americans have worse housing, lower scores on IQ tests, and higher percentages of young men in jail. The sneaking suspicion that African Americans might be inferior goes unchallenged in the hearts of many blacks and whites. It is all too easy to blame the victim and conclude that people of color are themselves responsible for being on the bottom. Without causal historical analysis, these racial disparities are impossible to explain.” pg. 169
“[John] Brown’s willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force of its own. ‘It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived,’ Henry David Thoreau observed in a eulogy in Boston. ‘These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.’ Thoreau went on to compare Brown with Jesus of Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.” pg. 175
“The U.S. government calls actions such as these ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ when other countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban and Libyan attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange the assassination of former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the United States has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.” pg. 221
“Often presidents and their advisors keep actions covert not for reasons of tactics abroad, but because they suspect the actions would not be popular with Congress or with the American people.” pg. 228
“Historical perspective is thus not a by-product of the passage of time. A more accurate view derives from Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, which suggests that the social practices of the period when history is written largely determine that history’s perspective on the past. Objective scholarship must be linked with a modern experience that permits it to prevail. The claim of inadequate historical perspective will not do as an excuse for ignoring the sasha. Historians have no reason other than timidity for avoiding a full and thoughtful exposition of our recent past.” pg. 251
“Quantitatively, the average U.S. citizen consumes the same resources as ten average world citizens or twenty-five residents of India. Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with a corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America’s cause is the cause of all humankind. Thus our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will never achieve our standard of living, for it they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it less likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.” pg. 262
“Our increasing power makes it increasingly possible that humankind will make the planet uninhabitable by accident.” pg. 262
“To be sure, museum boards include members of the upper class. Robert Heilbroner has pointed out that no matter what is done in America, members of the upper class usually have a hand in it; however, their participation does not mean that they directed the action, nor that it was in their class’s interest. In the early 1960s, for instance, when elite colleges and universities recruited almost solely in private and suburban public high schools and relied on standardized tests to screen applicants, their student bodies were overwhelmingly white. The power elite theorists could claim that the elite reserved these positions of privilege for their own offspring as part of the structure of unequal opportunity. In the late 1960s, when the same universities competed to recruit and admit African American students, the power elite theorists could claim that the elite was coopting the cream of ghetto society in order to stifle protest and maintain the structure of unequal opportunity. Thus critical or power elite theories seem to explain everything but may explain nothing.” pg. 277
“In sum, power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has. Indeed, regarding their alleged influence on American history textbooks, they may be scapegoats: blaming the power elite is comforting. Power elite theory offers tidy explanations: educational institutions cannot reform because the upper class prevents it, or the reform is not in that class’s interest. Accordingly, power elite theory may create a world more satisfying and more coherent in evil than the real world with which we are all complicit. Power elite theories thus absolve the rest of us from seeing that all of us participate in the process of cultural distortion. This line of thought not only excuses us from responsibility for the sorry state of American history as currently taught, it also frees us from the responsibility for changing it. What’s the use? Any action we might take would be inconsequential by definition.” pg. 278
“Rating committees face a Herculean task. Remember that the twelve books I examined average 888 pages. I have spent much of the last ten years struggling to comprehend and evaluate these books. In a single summer raters cannot even read all the books, let alone compare them meaningfully. Raters also wrestle with an average of seventy-three different rating criteria, which they apply to each book they rate, an Augean stable. Therefore publishers’ representatives can make a different. Since raters have time only to flip through most books, they look for easy readability, newness, a stunning color cover, appealing design, color illustrations, ancillary filmstrips, and ready-made teaching aids and test questions, seizing on these attributes as surrogates for quality. Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.” pg. 279
“Many textbooks that emphasize how wonderful, fair, and progressive our society has been give some students a basis for idealism. It may be empowering for children to believe that simply by living we all contribute to a constantly improving society. Maybe later, when students grow up and learn better, they will be motivated to change the system to make it resemble the ideal. Maybe stressing fairness as a basic American value provides a fulcrum from which students can criticize society when they discover, perhaps in college history courses, how it has often been unfair. This all may be an instance of Emily Dickinson’s couplet “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.” pg. 294-295
“The Future Lies Ahead—and What to Do about Them” pg. 312 [I thought this was a clever play on words. I stopped me for a second to think about it because I’m mostly used to the phrase “The future lies ahead” as in a future opportunity, not lies or untruths.]
“Teaching history backwards from the present also grips students’ attention. The teacher presents current statistics on high school seniors’ life chances, analyzed by race, sex, social class, and region—their prospects for various levels of educational achievement, divorce, incarceration, death by violence; their life expectancy, frequency of voting, etc. Then students are challenged to discuss events and processes in the past that cause these differences.” pg. 316
“History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history ‘Iconoclasm I and II,’ because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.” pg. 12
“A host of other reasons—pressure from the ‘ruling class,’ pressure from textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield children from harm or conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers—may help explain why textbooks omit troublesome facts. A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when we’re passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons. ‘People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,’ Helen Keller pointed out. ‘Conclusions are not always pleasant.’ Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are so accustomed to blandness that the textbook or teacher who brought real intellectual controversy into the classroom would strike us as a violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to speak well of the deceased, after all.” pg. 35
“Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most important cause of cultural development. Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthropologists call this phenomenon efflorescence. Children in elementary school learn that Persian and Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity due to their location on trade routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of European world domination, textbooks have a golden opportunity to apply this same idea of cultural diffusion to Europe. They squander it.” pg. 45
“We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon involved), rather than a discovery by one. The term New World is itself part of the problem, for people had lived in the Americas for thousands of years. The Americas were new only to Europeans. The word discover is another part of the problem, for how can one person discover what another already knows and owns? Our textbooks are struggling with this issue, trying to move beyond colonialized history and Eurocentric language.“ pg. 70-71
“Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. According to Langer, ‘Almost everyone, in that medieval time, interpreted the plague as a punishment by God for human sins.’ Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself. The entire culture of Europe was affected: fear, death, and guilt became prime artistic motifs. Milder plagues—typhus, syphilis, and influenza, as well as bubonic—continued to ravage Europe until the end of the seventeenth century.” pg. 78
“While textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black America, they remain largely silent regarding the impact of slavery on white America, North or South. Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans, or with the United States as a whole. Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy part. After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond has mounted an exhibit on slavery that does not romanticize the institution. Without explaining its relevance to the present, however, extensive coverage of slavery is like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff—just more facts for hapless eleventh graders to memorize.
Slavery’s twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery’s enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.” pg. 142-143
“On average, African Americans have worse housing, lower scores on IQ tests, and higher percentages of young men in jail. The sneaking suspicion that African Americans might be inferior goes unchallenged in the hearts of many blacks and whites. It is all too easy to blame the victim and conclude that people of color are themselves responsible for being on the bottom. Without causal historical analysis, these racial disparities are impossible to explain.” pg. 169
“[John] Brown’s willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force of its own. ‘It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived,’ Henry David Thoreau observed in a eulogy in Boston. ‘These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.’ Thoreau went on to compare Brown with Jesus of Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.” pg. 175
“The U.S. government calls actions such as these ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ when other countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban and Libyan attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange the assassination of former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the United States has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.” pg. 221
“Often presidents and their advisors keep actions covert not for reasons of tactics abroad, but because they suspect the actions would not be popular with Congress or with the American people.” pg. 228
“Historical perspective is thus not a by-product of the passage of time. A more accurate view derives from Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, which suggests that the social practices of the period when history is written largely determine that history’s perspective on the past. Objective scholarship must be linked with a modern experience that permits it to prevail. The claim of inadequate historical perspective will not do as an excuse for ignoring the sasha. Historians have no reason other than timidity for avoiding a full and thoughtful exposition of our recent past.” pg. 251
“Quantitatively, the average U.S. citizen consumes the same resources as ten average world citizens or twenty-five residents of India. Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with a corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America’s cause is the cause of all humankind. Thus our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will never achieve our standard of living, for it they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it less likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.” pg. 262
“Our increasing power makes it increasingly possible that humankind will make the planet uninhabitable by accident.” pg. 262
“To be sure, museum boards include members of the upper class. Robert Heilbroner has pointed out that no matter what is done in America, members of the upper class usually have a hand in it; however, their participation does not mean that they directed the action, nor that it was in their class’s interest. In the early 1960s, for instance, when elite colleges and universities recruited almost solely in private and suburban public high schools and relied on standardized tests to screen applicants, their student bodies were overwhelmingly white. The power elite theorists could claim that the elite reserved these positions of privilege for their own offspring as part of the structure of unequal opportunity. In the late 1960s, when the same universities competed to recruit and admit African American students, the power elite theorists could claim that the elite was coopting the cream of ghetto society in order to stifle protest and maintain the structure of unequal opportunity. Thus critical or power elite theories seem to explain everything but may explain nothing.” pg. 277
“In sum, power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has. Indeed, regarding their alleged influence on American history textbooks, they may be scapegoats: blaming the power elite is comforting. Power elite theory offers tidy explanations: educational institutions cannot reform because the upper class prevents it, or the reform is not in that class’s interest. Accordingly, power elite theory may create a world more satisfying and more coherent in evil than the real world with which we are all complicit. Power elite theories thus absolve the rest of us from seeing that all of us participate in the process of cultural distortion. This line of thought not only excuses us from responsibility for the sorry state of American history as currently taught, it also frees us from the responsibility for changing it. What’s the use? Any action we might take would be inconsequential by definition.” pg. 278
“Rating committees face a Herculean task. Remember that the twelve books I examined average 888 pages. I have spent much of the last ten years struggling to comprehend and evaluate these books. In a single summer raters cannot even read all the books, let alone compare them meaningfully. Raters also wrestle with an average of seventy-three different rating criteria, which they apply to each book they rate, an Augean stable. Therefore publishers’ representatives can make a different. Since raters have time only to flip through most books, they look for easy readability, newness, a stunning color cover, appealing design, color illustrations, ancillary filmstrips, and ready-made teaching aids and test questions, seizing on these attributes as surrogates for quality. Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.” pg. 279
“Many textbooks that emphasize how wonderful, fair, and progressive our society has been give some students a basis for idealism. It may be empowering for children to believe that simply by living we all contribute to a constantly improving society. Maybe later, when students grow up and learn better, they will be motivated to change the system to make it resemble the ideal. Maybe stressing fairness as a basic American value provides a fulcrum from which students can criticize society when they discover, perhaps in college history courses, how it has often been unfair. This all may be an instance of Emily Dickinson’s couplet “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.” pg. 294-295
“The Future Lies Ahead—and What to Do about Them” pg. 312 [I thought this was a clever play on words. I stopped me for a second to think about it because I’m mostly used to the phrase “The future lies ahead” as in a future opportunity, not lies or untruths.]
“Teaching history backwards from the present also grips students’ attention. The teacher presents current statistics on high school seniors’ life chances, analyzed by race, sex, social class, and region—their prospects for various levels of educational achievement, divorce, incarceration, death by violence; their life expectancy, frequency of voting, etc. Then students are challenged to discuss events and processes in the past that cause these differences.” pg. 316
I'm glad I read this book. It's useful, presented in a readable way for the most part, and necessary. It works against the jingoistic tone of American History, stripping away the sugar coating to inform the reader how it actually happened.
Unfortunately, the book is sometimes uneven. The second-to-last chapter is so dry, I set the book aside for a week contemplating if I wanted to read the whole thing. There are some contradictions; the author wants race relations discussed in greater depth, but objects to the information coming from members of the oppressed race. The author objects to making heroes of our historical figures, but then spends most of the chapter on the Civil War building a shrine to Abraham Lincoln.
That's not the say the book is deeply flawed. It addresses several of my own observations about learning history in American schools. The picture in textbooks is scattershot and composed of names and dates, which this book does a lot to remedy. I got a much better idea of the big picture from this book, and how one event led to another. And, despite the author's stated distaste for POC sources, he does illustrate racism throughout history, and how it affects the present. Reading this book, it's clear that racism remains a factor despite slavery's ending 150 years ago, and it's in our power to fix it. Also, he very nicely debunks the "states' rights" myth of the Civil War.
The chapter on the first Thanksgiving told me little I didn't know, though it did highlight points I hadn't thought much about. I'd hoped it would have something I hadn't already unlearned. But then, Nathaniel Philbrick took an entire book, Mayflower, to expand on the concept, so I shouldn't be surprised his was more comprehensive.
Overall, I found this an informative read, and would recommend it to anyone who knew something was missing from the American History class in high school. Unless textbook publishers take some of his words to heart, I think this should be added to the curriculum. Despite its wide approach, it makes history a far more interesting subject, populated with human beings and a narrative instead of cardboard cutouts in flashbulb bursts.
Unfortunately, the book is sometimes uneven. The second-to-last chapter is so dry, I set the book aside for a week contemplating if I wanted to read the whole thing. There are some contradictions; the author wants race relations discussed in greater depth, but objects to the information coming from members of the oppressed race. The author objects to making heroes of our historical figures, but then spends most of the chapter on the Civil War building a shrine to Abraham Lincoln.
That's not the say the book is deeply flawed. It addresses several of my own observations about learning history in American schools. The picture in textbooks is scattershot and composed of names and dates, which this book does a lot to remedy. I got a much better idea of the big picture from this book, and how one event led to another. And, despite the author's stated distaste for POC sources, he does illustrate racism throughout history, and how it affects the present. Reading this book, it's clear that racism remains a factor despite slavery's ending 150 years ago, and it's in our power to fix it. Also, he very nicely debunks the "states' rights" myth of the Civil War.
The chapter on the first Thanksgiving told me little I didn't know, though it did highlight points I hadn't thought much about. I'd hoped it would have something I hadn't already unlearned. But then, Nathaniel Philbrick took an entire book, Mayflower, to expand on the concept, so I shouldn't be surprised his was more comprehensive.
Overall, I found this an informative read, and would recommend it to anyone who knew something was missing from the American History class in high school. Unless textbook publishers take some of his words to heart, I think this should be added to the curriculum. Despite its wide approach, it makes history a far more interesting subject, populated with human beings and a narrative instead of cardboard cutouts in flashbulb bursts.
Really enjoyed this thought provoking book and admit I did learn some historical facts as well. Especially critical in this time as we discuss book banning, CRT, and how and what history can be taught in our schools.
Truth is socially constructed. There is a reciprocal relationship between the truth of the past and justice for the present and future. Author's tone comes across sassy and salty. And don't mention Columbus and textbook publishers...dude haaates em.
-Heroification to support patriotism removes blemishes like racism, socialism, colonialism leading to an ignorant public devoid of the ability to critically think.
-American Indians & other minorities deserve more credit for the role they played in establishing America. We borrowed a lot of their technology and ideas. They were just as smart as White settlers.
-History should be studied as a series of arguments, issues, and controversies rather than a set of facts to memorize and regurgitate.
-Cognitive dissonance destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. We molded our ideas to rationalize acts like slavery.
-We like to blame victims not systems. We deserve the ability to see our country accurately even if it's not pretty but we don't want to confront the truth. We lie to ourselves about our ethnocentric past, fall into the mind trap of progress, and sometimes take the international good guy reputation too far.
-Progress as an ideology has been intrinsically anti-revolutionary. Because things are getting better all the time everyone should believe in the system.
-Core issues of deservedness for economic equality
-What is our democracy if it doesn't teach its citizens the truth?
I don't remember exactly when I read this book, but I think it was in 2006. I do remember that I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Everyone should read this book, especially if you have a kid or will have a kid who will take history classes someday. We need to better educate our young so that they can grow up informed about history and it's affect on today's circumstances.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced