Lies My Teacher Told Me Summary

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What Your Teacher Left out of Your High School History Course
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, the author, James W. Loewen attempts to acknowledge and correct or offer various possibilities of historically significant events to American history. Loewen also offers reasons why minorities typically perform the lowest in history, more so than any other school subjects. In doing so, he exposes all of the lies highlighting white protestant innovations that history textbooks use to teach American students that position minorities below whites Protestants.
Loewen begins with explaining the detrimental effects of teaching the youth of America with the information in the current history textbooks. Most …show more content…

There is strong evidence that Asian and African cultures may have also reached the Americas up to 8,000 years ago, clearly preceding Columbus, followed by the Norse cultures of Northern Europe as early as 2,500 years ago. By not acknowledging most of these trips, or only briefly, it undermines minorities, by the suggestion of history textbooks that only protestant Anglos-Saxon discoveries are important. Many textbooks also fail to mention all of the atrocities Columbus and his followers committed on the native people, then looking to the future to the black slaves of America, based on the Columbian exchange that brought African slaves to …show more content…

Most make excuses for why slavery continued in America, despite the various wars that were waged to preserve the forced labor system, ranging from the obscure Seminole wars, to the War of 1812, to the obvious Civil War. Even after the Civil War ended, racism continued to be prevalent in American society through the KKK and other racial hate groups. Woodrow Wilson is considered the most racist president in American history, although textbooks would never mention this because it hurts the image of the benevolent white man. Conversely, American textbooks usually fail to mention, or portray many anti-racism advocates as radical or insane, like John Brown, where as they present the moderate anti-racists such as Lincoln as the great protectors of the African American race. This kept African Americans as second class citizens. This second class citizenship remained with them, along with many immigrants during the industrial revolution. Although white immigrants received horrible pay and unsafe working conditions, African Americans could scarcely ever find

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