Lies My Teacher Told Me

His was merely the first white face to gaze upon the Mississippi. That’s why most American history textbooks include

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.

Although each of us comes into the world de novo, we are not really new creatures. We arrive into a social slot, born not only to a family but also a religion, community, and, of course, a nation and a culture.

no “white” people in Europe before 1492. With the transatlantic slave trade, first Indian, then African, Europeans increasingly saw “white” as a race and race as an important human characteristic.84 Columbus’s own writings reflect this increasing

History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learned.

Thanksgiving has thus moved from history into the field of religion, “civil religion,” as Robert Bellah has called it. To Bellah, civil religions hold society together.

The American Pageant were often used in “advanced placement”

Origin myths do not come cheaply.

a high school history teacher, has pointed out that “the sailors are stupid, superstitious, cowardly, and sometimes scheming. Columbus, on the other hand, is brave, wise, and godly.” These portrayals amount to an “anti-working class pro-boss polemic.”