Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.

With the blessing of Britain and France, and in a joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk. After

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,

Even the best textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive” Americans with modern Europeans. Part of the problem is that the books are really comparing rural America to urban Europe—Massachusetts to London. Comparing Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) to rural Scotland might produce a very different impression, for when Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan w

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918.

from three hundred thousand in 1769

His administration submitted an extensive legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass

In truth, few people on both sides of the Atlantic believed in 1492 that the world was flat. Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be round. It looks round. It casts a circular shadow on the moon. Sailors see its roundness when ships disappear over the horizon, hull first, then sails.

He segregated the navy, which had not previously been segregated, relegating African Americans to kitchen and boiler work.