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

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of constant progress. Including ideas would make history contingent: things could go either way, and have on occasion. The 'right' people, armed with the 'right' ideas, have not always won. When they didn't, the authors would be in the embarrassing position of having to disapprove of an outcome in the past. Including ideas would introduce uncertainty. This is not textbook style.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. . . . We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise. —CHARLES V. WILLIE”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: “It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from 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.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Could it be that we don’t want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant.”41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, “often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people).94”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“The historian must have no country. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. "Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery," according to [Gary] Nash. Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white thugs who coveted their land and improvements. In time of war the position of assimilated Indians grew particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns, were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorities who weren't careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was Indian. Through the centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. “People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty,” Karen Kupperman tells us, if caught by whites.49 Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Native nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“history textbooks need to disabuse students of the flat-earth myth.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be “bound hand and foot” and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners “went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy,” in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes “infamous and embarrassing.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explorers such as de Soto just because they were white, our histories offend all people of color. When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose must be to keep us unaware of the important questions. Perhaps worst of all, when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus, they provide feel-good history that bores everyone.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. “Take a look in your history book, and you’ll see why we should be proud” goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. . . . We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise. —CHARLES V. WILLIE3”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God’s chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth. —W.E.B. DUBOIS2”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —MAYA ANGELOU1”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism.”
― James W. Loewen, quote from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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