Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In this superb book, James Loewen argues what most Americans have understood since childhood, namely that our American History textbooks, are, boring, theme-driven, inaccurate and largely ineffective at imparting the richness of their subject. While the book�s title and argument may seem like a leftist gerrymander, they are not. Loewen, a professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont (who spent several years analyzing ten high school American History textbooks totaling more than 8,000 pages), is not out to reverse the traditional cast of heroes and villains in American history. Instead, Loewen advocates an honest and inclusive history that simply reveals events as they actually happened. While this may expose some dark truths about �heroic� people and events in American history, and may cast historical �villains� in a new light, Loewen does not believe it will cause students to despise their country. On the contrary, he argues that revealing conflicts and problems that our text books ignore or conceal will make American history come alive and will almost certainly enhance students� appreciation for their country. Ironically, while many textbook editors and teachers fear that altering their inaccurate and theme-driven content will cause students to despise their country, they miss the fact that this is precisely what the specious, vapid nature of the textbooks already accomplishes. Some of Loewen�s interesting observations are contained below: COLUMBUS Columbus was almost certainly not the first European to discover or colonize North America. He tortured and mutilated the native population of Haiti and eventually exterminated it by working the inhabitants to death searching for gold. All of these facts are available in the journals of Columbus and his colleagues. NATIVE AMERICANS Prior to the arrival of white settlers, North America was thickly settled with tens of millions of Indian tribes that formed a complex civilization consisting of advanced agricultural techniques (guess where white settlers learned it from), trade, roads, villages, and government. The white settlers wiped out most of these people at first inadvertently by spreading disease, and then deliberately through wars of extermination. History text books often present Indians as sparse, primitive, violent (it was actually white people who scalped Indians), and inevitable victims of progress. RECONSTRUCTION For more than one hundred years, history textbooks have characterized post-Civil War Reconstruction as a combination of white corruption and black ineptitude. Few mention that the ultimate cause of Reconstruction�s failure was the terrorism that some white southerners perpetrated against black people and white�s who favored reconstruction. Many of the so called carpetbaggers and scallywags were in fact anti racists who attempted to help rebuild the south along egalitarian lines. And when given even minimal opportunities (most of which were subsequently dismantled by the government), blacks were able to build successful businesses and to win the Kentucky Derby a few times. LABOR AND SOCIAL CLASSES High school textbooks never admit that America even has social classes. They treat labor problems as something that happened a long time ago and which the government fixed of its own good will. PROGRESS The textbooks also present the United States as the vanguard of social progress while failing to admit that many of the social issues we still strive for such as equality between men and women have already been accomplished by other nations or people in history. CIVIL RIGHTS According to American history text books, the government spontaneously decided to give civil rights to blacks and other oppressed minorities, but this decision did not result from a populist struggle that was initially met with state sponsored violence and brutality. VIETNAM Similarly U.S. history textbooks argued that the Vietnam War sort of happened and sort of ended. They don�t examine why the U.S. got involved in the war and why it stopped fighting. They also overlook the brutality of the war that was waged largely against civilians on whom the United States dropped three times as much bomb tonnage as all theatres of World War II combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT THIS WAY Perhaps the most fascinating part of Loewen�s book is his examination of why high school history books are permeated with boredom and lies. Surprisingly, Loewen does not blame this phenomenon on the power elite that ultimately controls the publication of these books. Instead, Loewen concludes that a number of damaging, but less insidious processes are at work. For example, since many history teachers don�t really know their subject, they are afraid to challenge or teach outside of the textbooks, which become a source of pedagogical authority. Even qualified and highly motivated teachers are often afraid to deviate from the textbook because they believe that failing to paint a rosy picture of America will somehow hurt students. Finally, there is the textbook publishing industry that is understandably motivated to sell books more than it is to tell the truth. Loewen correctly concludes that when you unmask many of the lies in U.S. History text books, America does not suddenly become odious, and while people like Columbus may become more controversial, they are not transformed into villains. Instead American history is full of conflict that displays the richness and fascination of its history. Concealing and distorting this conflict is sort of like telling a child that his/her parents are perfect. The child will not only get bored with these themes but will quickly learn that they are false. If the child learns that his/her parents made mistakes, then far from hating them, the child will probably appreciate their humanity and learn more from them. History is the same way.