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James W. Loewen taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont and also at a predominantly black college in Mississippi. He attended Carleton College and holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history. In doing so, he found an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation. In response, he wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, a critique of existing textbooks, but also a retelling of American history as it should, and could, be taught (www.uvm.edu/ jloewen). Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong was released in 1999. His other books include Mississippi: Conflict and Change (co-authored), which won the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction. He also wrote The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, Social Science in the Courtroom, and The Truth About Columbus. History is a selection of facts, and Loewen argues convincingly that current textbooks have chosen to include all the wrong facts. 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. In the discussion of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Brown was noted as being a “madman” and Lincoln a “hero”.
Approximate Word count = 908
Approximate Pages = 3.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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