
Lies My Teacher Told Me

The American Pageant were often used in “advanced placement”
James W. Loewen • Lies My Teacher Told Me
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
James W. Loewen • Lies My Teacher Told Me
if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously? This ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea of “God on our side” was used to legitimize the open expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority vis-à-vis Mexicans, Native Americans,
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The textbook authors seem unaware that ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians sailed at least as far as Ireland and England, reached Madeira and the Azores, traded with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and sailed all the way around Africa before 600 BC. Instead, the textbooks credit Bartolomeu Dias with being the first to round the Cape
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This continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in everyday conversation—“refined or enlightened”—with “having a complex division of labor,” the only definition that anthropologists defend. When we consider the continuum carefully, it immediately becomes problematic. Was the Third Reich civilized, for instance?
James W. Loewen • Lies My Teacher Told Me
It invites students to come to their own conclusions. Textbook authors don’t let that happen. They see their job as presenting “facts” for children to “learn,” not encouraging them to think for themselves. Such an approach keeps students ignorant of the reasoning, arguments, and weighing of evidence that go into social science.
James W. Loewen • Lies My Teacher Told Me
Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England.
James W. Loewen • Lies My Teacher Told Me
Not one book points out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Doubtless the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal which, just for the record, probably didn’t involve beads at all, but more than $2,400 worth of metal kettles, steel knives and axes, guns, and blankets, in today’s dollars. The Weckquaesgeeks, who
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Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States.