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

click here for more details, find new or used items	James W. Loewen Our price £24.49 (£22.50) New from £24.49 Used from £16.71 Pages: 384 (Hardcover) ISBN: 156584100X Pub: The New Press Pub date: 1994-01-30 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 539615

Reader Reviews:

Lies My Teacher Told Me by J. Loewen. Very good. (0/0 people found this helpful)

The book "Lies my teacher told me: everything your American History Textbook got wrong" is by James W. Loewen. It covers many issues about patriotism and related topics. The book could use some updating with more historical information about the topic addressed. For example, the Pledge was the origin of the stiff-arm salute that was adopted later by the National Socialist German Workers Party. The early salute for the Pledge of Allegiance was the straight-arm salute. Francis Bellamy was the author of the Pledge (1892) and cousin to Edward Bellamy, author of an international bestseller that launched the nationalism movement. Edward's book was translated into every major language, including German. Francis and Edward were both self-proclaimed socialists in the Nationalism movement and they promoted military socialism. They wanted government to take over all schools and impose robotic chanting to flags. When the government granted their wish, government schools imposed segregation by law and taught racism as official policy. That behavior even outlasted German National Socialism. The Pledge's early right-arm salute was not an ancient Roman salute, and the 'ancient Roman salute' myth came from the Pledge. In addition to the notorious salute, American socialists (e.g. Edward Bellamy teamed with the Theosophical Society) also bear some blame for the notorious symbol usd by the National Socialist German Workers Party on its flag. While Edward and the Theosophical Society worked together, the same symbol was used by the Society. It was used as alphabetical symbolism for socialism, and adopted later by German socialists as their flag symbol. Although an ancient symbol, it was altered for use as overlapping S-letters for 'socialism.' It was deliberately turned 45 degrees counter clockwise and always oriented in the S-direction. Similar alphabetic symbolism is still visible as Volkswagen logos. People were persecuted for refusing to perform robotic chanting to the national flag at the same time in the USA and Germany (to the American flag, and to the German symbol flag). Most of the above are modern discoveries (do a web search for "stop the pledge") by a different writer, America's leading authority on the Pledge of Allegiance, Dr. Rex Curry (author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets"). On the other hand, the author Loewen completely evades the topic of the Pledge's early gesture, and he seems to be unaware of the recent historical discoveries.

America the beautiful (2/3 people found this helpful)

After reading this book I became more aware of things as I read them. Started questioning and not getting answers. Why is there a full chapter in the history books about Columbus but all have differing stories(wealthy? Poor? Massacred people? Or the ommission of wars in U.S. history books that are the cornerstone of Russian history lessons. Did they not ocurr? I smart read. Well researched.

Good critique, but also well worth reading US history (9/11 people found this helpful)

Two books in one.

A critique of how history is taught in US (though I bet much of this is relevant elsewhere...), with "Disneyfied" propaganda replacing facts - or more important - eliminating open debate & analysis. That is intriguing, but I got bored after a few chapters: there is a limit to the number of times you need to be told the same point.

Much more interesting, is the way that the book is constructed as a dozen chapters on episodes from US history. These make a very interesting view of US history, from Columbus, through to Vietnam.

I would recomend it anyone looking for a concise, opinionated, iconoclastic history of USA. Similar to Zinn "People's History" but a lot shorter & pithier (if less scholarly)

Let's stop encouraging mindless conformity (6/6 people found this helpful)

Whether or not they agree with all of Loewen's analyses, most people would admit that high school American history texts are pretty boring. Loewen focuses on the problem; publishers are afraid to offend anyone, so textbooks see the government as altruistic, past leaders as cardboard heroes and US history as a constant progression towards some idealistic goal. The books tend to leave out direct quotes from speeches and other primary sources, they fail to make connections between the past and present, and they gloss over the recent past. Loewen's point is not that we have to agree with all his viewpoints but that we need to train students to think. Teachers can't do so if the entire class, by seeing history as a bunch of isolated facts to be memorized, is being put to sleep.

Politically-correct lock-step nonsense (2/10 people found this helpful)

This hyper-politically-correct tome will win the affection of academia, with their hatred of power (real or perceived) and hostility toward the very idea of dispassionate truth. It's not that the author makes no good points -- indeed, many of his points are extremely well-taken -- it's that his agenda is so open, his axe-grinding so blatant, that unless you've already researched the histories in-depth, you just don't know which parts of his analysis to trust and which to discard as leftist hyperbole and fiction. In fact, the best thing I can say about this book is that the author made little attempt to hide his very pronounced sociopolitical biases.

My advice: Ignore the book. There are many books examining the mind-boggling distortions of "history" -- distortions as gladly perpetrated by the political left as the right -- which still manage to avoid the strident anti-establishment tone and vomitous academic pandering that Loewen glories in.

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