Lies My Teacher Told Me
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Ratings11
Average rating3.5
15
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Ratings11
Average rating3.5
Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has gone on to win an American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and to sell over half a million copies in its various editions. What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls "an extremely convincing plea for truth in education." In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the Mai Lai massacre, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should -- and could -- be taught to American students. - Publisher.
Reviews with the most likes.
Definitely a very interesting listen. There were things from history I knew already and some I learned, but I was definitely a bit surprised to know how awful and wrong the school history textbooks can be. I mean I've known this to happen in my Indian textbooks too but I think my childhood assumption of everything being better in America still persists somewhere in my head that I forgot that the narrative that history textbooks tell always have a political tint, tilting towards the government in power and attitudes in the country, even in the USA.
While I did like listening to this audiobook, I think I'll find this more valuable in the future when I'll have a school going kid in America. I'll surely get back to this book at the time and also hopefully look through the history textbooks available in the future to ensure my kid gets a more nuanced and updated perspective on things.
