A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. A researcher who discovered that many, and in many states most communities were "Sundown Towns" that kept out blacks (and sometimes other groups) for decades. (Some still do.) An educator who attended Carleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, and taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont. Learn More...

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Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
(Gustavus Myers Human Rights Book Award, Selected by Booklist as a 2005 Editor's Choice Selection)

From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by "kinder gentler means." Learn More...

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong

American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate history teaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The stories they tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not been already. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. No wonder students lose interest. We have got to do better. Learn More...

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Did you know that the automobile was invented in rural Wisconsin? That a Texas preacher beat the Wright brothers by a year, in a plane inspired by the word of God? That four different people in three different states "first" used anesthesia in an operation? That Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin in Kentucky built 30 years after his death? Those things never happened, of course, but the landscape commemorates them anyway.

Lies Across America teaches visitors to read between the lines of historical markers and to deconstruct the sculptures on monuments and memorials. Viewed in this way, the lies and omissions across the American countryside suggest times and ways that the United States went astray as a nation. Learn More...

The Mississippi Chinese : Between Black and White

This scholarly, carefully researched book studies one of the most overlooked minority groups in America---the Chinese of the Mississippi Delta. During Reconstruction, white plantation owners imported Chinese sharecroppers in the hope of replacing their black laborers. In the beginning they were classed with blacks. But the Chinese soon moved into the towns and became almost without exception, owners of small groceries. Loewen details their astounding transition from "black" to essentially white status. Learn More...

Everything You've Been Taught is Wrong: Fact, Fiction, and Lies in American History: 14 Lectures (Audio CD)

The study of the past is supposed to help us make sense of our place in history and inform the choices we make every day. But what if the lessons we were taught in American History class were not true? In this eye-opening and provocative series of lectures, renowned historian James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, unravels the fact from the fiction, the unvarnished truths from the convenient myths, and explains the reasons American history has so often been distorted.

The Portable Professor is a series of exciting and informative lectures recorded by some of today's most renowned university and college professors. Each course introduces listeners to fascinating, and sometimes startling, insights into the intellectual forces that shape our understanding of the world. Each package includes 14 riveting lectures presented by notable professors as well as a book-length course guide. Learn More

Lies My Teacher Told Me [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)

Now as an Audio Book! Loewen's politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks-including The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy; and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti-is sure to please. In condemning the way history is taught, he indicts everyone involved in the enterprise: authors, publishers, adoption committees, parents and teachers. Loewen (Mississippi: Conflict and Change) argues that the bland, Eurocentric treatment of history bores most elementary and high school students, who also find it irrelevant to their lives. To make learning more compelling, Loewen urges authors, publishers and teachers to highlight the drama inherent in history by presenting students with different viewpoints and stressing that history is an ongoing process, not merely a collection of-often misleading-factoids. Readers interested in history, whether liberal or conservative, professional or layperson, will find food for thought here. Learn More...