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

This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.

Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called “hyphenated Americans.” “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” said Wilson, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of American Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia’s patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took act

The first non-Native settlers in “the country we now know as the United States” were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt.

Estimates of Haiti’s pre-Columbian population range as high as eight million people. When Christopher Columbus returned

Captain John Smith, for example, used Columbus as a role model in proposing a get-tough policy for the Virginia Indians in 1624:

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

(by which time it had already been cut in half by various Spanish-borne diseases) to thirty thousand a century later, owing mainly to the gold rush, which brought “disease, starvation, homicide, and a declining birthrate.”

All the textbooks tell how Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France.” Not one points out that it was not France’s land to sell—it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners before selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana f