Lies+My+Teacher+Told+Me+by+James+Loewen

//Lies My Teacher Told Me// by James W. Loewen

Jamens Loewen’s , //Lies My Teacher Told Me//, is intended to elicit an outrageous and epiphonic reaction. Loewen addresses grievances, misrepresentations and absence present in the high school text  and curriculum of the American educational system. It is fairly uncommon for students to disregard, disagree or entirely disregard the profusely of information presented to them during their formative years. Many students, myself included, have been presented with facts used inappropriately or out of context, half balls in face truths and even out right preconceived lies. As children and young adults, we don’t often question what we are taught and this, Loewen declares, is hugely problematic to the proper education and eventual success of today’s [|ibcbet] students.
 * Summary hey**

Often, argues Loewen, history is abbreviated and cleaned up before being immortalized in text  and classroom and presented to American youth. Information which is intentionally or deliberately suppressed has left American children ignorant of much of the accuracies of U.S. history as well as creating an utter disinterest in broadening their knowledge of said histo

Main topics Loewen broaches include; hero-ification of historical figures, Christopher Columbus’ true cultural and historical impact, racism and anti-racism in textbooks, federal control over textbook content, the absence of recent past in history classes, why history is bereft of many titillating details and recounts and what the affects of this may be. It is proposed that such details and information is trimmed from textbook material because students may get “too excited” and may be incited to rebel against the authority figures of their school or the parents of more traditional, conservative or religious students may find the material objectionable.

It is frightening to think of the power of the textbook. Historian really can alter history and educational systems truly can mold the future with their choice of textbook. Bureaucracy plays a major role in deciding what and how our children will learn. Loewen argues that this is a dangerous and disheartening predicament and that if we cannot change it, we should at least take steps to educate ourselves, our children and those around us of the truths which are ignored or altered in schools today. //Lies My Teacher Told Me// is only the beginning.

Loewen’s , //Lies My Teacher Told Me//, is a brazen attempt to illuminate many of the discrepancies between accurate historical documents and high school textbooks and curriculum which have been left in the dark for so long. It is brace and intriguing but I don’t think Lowen would be please with the impact of his work if his [|Ruby888] readers didn’t respond to this  with by emoting… “Interesting, but it’s only one book”…


 * Key Passages**
 * __Chapter 1:__**
 * Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making**

pg 19 “Many American history textbooks are studded with biographical vignettes of the very famous (//Land of Promise// devotes a box to each president) and the famous (//The Challenge of Freedom// provides “Did You Know?” boxes about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of //A Raisin in the Sun//, among many others). In themselves, vignettes are not a bad idea. They instruct by human example. They show diverse ways that people can make a difference. They allow textbooks to give space to characters such as Blackwell and Hansberry, who relieve what would otherwise be a monolithic parade of white male political leaders. […] Textbooks [|Ruby888] should include //some// people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.”

pg 19 “My concern here, however, is not who gets chosen, but rather what happens to the heroes when they are introduced into our history textbooks and our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans provide case studies of heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson was unarguably an important president, and he receives extensive textbook coverage. Keller, on the other hand, was a “little person” who pushed through no legislation, changed the course of no scientific discipline, declared no war. Only one of the twelve history textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. But teachers love to talk about Keller.… Heroification so distorts the lives of Keller and Wilson (and many others) that we cannot think straight about them.”

pg 20 “Over the past ten years, I have asked dozens of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. They all know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most of them know that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak…. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant…. To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word //humanitarian// is to lie by omission.”

pg 24 “Textbooks might (but don’t) call Wilson’s Latin American actions a “Bad Neighbor Policy….” Instead, faced with unpleasantries, textbooks wriggle to get the hero off the hook…. //Land of// //Promise// is vague as to who caused the invasions but seems certain they were not Wilson’s doing….”

pg 25 “Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw, but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information is a passive voice helps to insulate historical figures from their own unheroic or unethical deeds.”

pg 25 “Some  go beyond omitting the actor and leave out the act itself.”

pg 28 “Omitting or absolving Wilson’s racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white perspective. The coverup denies all students the chance to learn something important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led.”

pg 31 “For some years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an experiment in social archetypes at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He asks his first-year college students for ““the first ten names that you think of”” in American history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students listed the same military figures year after year, replicating the privileged positions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the proviso, ““excluding presidents, generals, statesmen, etc.””

pg 32 “Curators of history museums know that their visitors bring archetypes in with them. Some curators consciously design exhibits to confront these archetypes when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors, teachers, and moviemakers would better fulfill their educational mission if they don’t also taught against inaccurate archetypes.”

pg 33 “Why do textbooks promote wartless stereotypes? The authors’ omissions and errors can hardly be accidental. The producers of the filmstrips, movies, and other educational materials on Helen Keller surely know she was a socialist; no one can read Keller’s writings without becoming aware of her [|Royal1688] political and social philosophy…. Wilson’s racism is also well known to professional historians. Why don’t they let the public in on these matters?”

pg33 “Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. The textbook critic Norma Gabler has testified that textbooks should ““present our nation’s patriots in a way that would honor and respect them….””

pg 34 ““There are three great taboos in textbook publishing””[…] ““sex, religion, and social class….”” Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all…. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has ““the power to rise in the world,”” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”


 * __Chapter 2__:**
 * 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus**

pg 38 “Christopher Columbus sailed in from the blue. American history  present Columbus pretty much without precedent, and they portray him as America’s first great hero. In so canonizing him, they reflect our national culture…. Columbus is one of only two people the United States honors by name in a national holiday. The one date that every schoolchild remembers is 1492, and sure enough, all twelve textbooks I surveyed include it. But they leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus so that readers will identify with him.”

pg 39 “The textbooks’ first mistake is to underplay previous explorers. People from other continents had reached the Americas many times before 1492. Even if Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the Americas. Indeed, Europeans may already have been fishing off Newfoundland in the 1480s. In a sense Columbus’s voyage was not the first but the last “discovery” of the Americas. It was epoch-making because of the way in which Europe responded. Columbus’s importance is therefore primarily attributable to changing conditions in Europe, not to his having reached a “new” continent.”

pg40 “In any case, humanism can hardly explain Columbus, since he and his royal sponsors were devout orthodox Catholics, not humanists. //The American Way// tells us, nonetheless, that Columbus ““had the humanist’s belief that people could do anything if they knew enough and tried hard enough.”” This is Columbus as the Little Engine That Could!”

pg 41 “Some teachers still teach what their predecessors taught me forty years ago: that Europe needed spices to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the bad Turks cut off the spice trade. Three  -//The American Tradition//, //Land of Promise//, and //The American Way//-repeat this falsehood. In the words of //Land of Promise//, ““Then after 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, trade with the East all but stopped.”” But A.H. Lybyer disproved this statement in 1915! Turkey had nothing to do with the development of new routines to the Indies. On the contrary, the Turks had every reason to keep the old Eastern Mediterranean route open, since they made money from it.”

pg 41-42 “The changes in Europe not only prompted Columbus’s voyages and the probable contemporaneous trips to America by Portuguese, Basque, and Bristol fishermen, but they also paved the way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years. Except for the intervention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential development in human history. Our history books ought to discuss seriously what happened and why, instead of supplying vague, nearly circular pronouncements such as this, from //The American Tradition:// ““Interest in practical matters and the world outside Europe led to advances in shipbuilding and navigation.””

pg 42 “Perhaps foremost among the significant factors the textbooks leave out are advances in military technology. Around 1400, European rulers began to commission ever bigger guns and learned to mount them on ships. Europe’s incessant wars gave rise tot his arms race, which also ushered in refinements in archery, drill, and siege warfare. China, the Ottoman Empire, and other nations in Asia and Africa now fell prey to European arms, and in 1493 the Americans began to succumb as well. We live with this arms race still…. Western nations continue to try to keep non-Western nations disadvantaged in military technology. Just as the thirteen British colonies tried to outlaw the sale of guns to Native Americans, the United States now tries to outlaw the sale of nuclear technology to Third World countries…. The Western advantage in military technology is still a burning issue. Nonetheless, not a single textbook mentions arms as a cause of European world domination.”

pg 44 “High school students don’t usually think about the rise of Europe to world domination. It is rarely presented as a question. It seems natural, a given, not something that needs to be explained. Deep down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we’re smarter. Of course, there are no studies showing Americans to be more intelligent than, say, Iraqis. Still, since textbooks don’t identify or encourage us to think about the real causes, ““we’re smarter”” festers as a possibility.”

pg 44-45 “The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately, and this is based on fact: Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the Indians was inevitable if not natural. This is unfortunate, because Columbus’s voyages constitute a splendid teachable moment. As official missions of a nation-state, they exemplify the new Europe. Merchants and rulers collaborated to finance and authorize them. The second expedition was heavily armed…. If textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently about why the West dominates the world today.”

pg 51 “Of the twelve textbooks I surveyed, only two even mention the possibility of African or Phoenician exploration. //The American Adventure// simply poses two questions: ““What similarities are there between the great monuments of the Maya and those of ancient Egypt?”” and ““Might windblown sailors from Asia, Europe, Africa, or the South Pacific have mingled with the earlier inhabitants of the New World?”” The textbook supplies no relevant information and even claims, ““You should be able to deal with these questions without doing research.”” Nonsense. Most classrooms will simply ignore the questions.”

pg 57 “Thus nasty details like cutting off hands have somewhat greater historical importance than nice touches like ““Tierra!”” Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history. Yet only one of the twelve textbooks, //The American Pageant//, mentions [|คาสิโนออนไลน์] the extermination. None mentions Columbus’s role in it.”

pg 64 “I am not proposing that we should begin courses of American history by crying that Columbus was bad and so are we. On the contrary, textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.”

pg 65 “We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon involved), rather than a discovery by one. The term //New World// is itself part of the problem, for people had lived in the Americas for thousands of years. The Americas were new only to Europeans. The word //discover// is another part of the problem, for how can one person discover what another already knows and owns? Our textbooks are struggling with this issue, trying to move beyond colonized history and Eurocentric language.”

pg 66 “So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 600 B.C. to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as our textbooks simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with whit Western exploitation rather than study it.”


 * __Chapter 3:__**
 * The Truth about the First Thanksgiving**

pg 76 “I have asked hundreds of college students, ““When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?”” This is a generous way of phrasing the question; surely “we now know as” implies that the original settlement antedated the founding of the United States. I initially believed-certainly I had hoped- that students would suggest 30,000 B.C., or some other pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was “1620.” Obviously, my students’ heads have been filled with America’s origin myth, the story of the first Thanksgiving. Textbooks are among the retailers of this prime legend. Pat of the problem is the word //settle//. “Settlers” were white, a student once pointed out to me. “Indians” didn’t settle…. As we shall see, however, if Indians hadn’t already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.”

pg 77 “Starting the story of America’s settlement with the Pilgrims leaves out not only the Indians but also the Spanish. The very first non-Native settlers in the “country we now know as the United States” were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt. In 1565 the Spanish massacred the French Protestants who had settled briefly at St. Augustine, Florida, and established their own fort there. Some later Spanish settlers were our first pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one-third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been “American,” and that Hispanic Americans lived here before the first ancestor of the Daughters of the American Revolution ever left England.”

pg 83 “Europeans were never able to “settle” China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there. The crucial role played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe had only about seventy million people when Columbus set forth. The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to “settle” the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required. Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.”

pg 84 “The American Republic,” the authors of //The American Pageant// tell us on page one, “was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside.” Henry Dobyns and Francis Jennings have pointed out that this type archetype of the “virgin continent” and its corollary, the “primitive tribe,” have subtly influenced estimates of Native population: scholars who viewed Native American culture as primitive reduced their estimates of precontact populations to match the stereotype. The tiny Mooney estimate thus “made sense”-resonated with the archetype. Never mind that the land was, in reality, not a virgin wilderness but recently widowed.”

pg 85 “How do twelve textbooks, most of which were published in the 1980s, treat this topic? Their authors might let readers in on the furious debate of the 1960s and early 1970s, telling how and why estimates changed. Instead, the textbooks simply state numbers-very different numbers! “As many as ten million,” //American Adventures// proposes. “There were only about 1,000,000 North American Indians,” opines //The American Tradition//. “Scattered across the North American continent were about 500 different groups, many of them nomadic.” Like other Americans who have not studied the literature, the authors of history textbooks are still under the thrall of the “virgin land” and “primitive tribe” archetypes; their most common Indian population estimate is the discredited figure of one million, which five textbooks supply. Only two of the textbooks provide estimates of ten to twelve million, in the range supported by contemporary scholarship. Two of the textbooks hedge their bets by suggesting one to twelve million, which might reasonably prompt classroom discussion of why estimates are so vague. Three of the textbooks omit the subject altogether.”

pg 85 “The problem is not so much the estimates as the attitude. Only one book, //The American Adventure//, acknowledges that there is a controversy, and this only in a footnote. The other textbooks seem bent on presenting “facts” for children to “learn.” Such an approach keeps student ignorant of the reasoning, arguments, and weighing of evidence that go into social science.”

pg 85 “About the plagues the textbooks tell even less. Only three of the twelve textbooks even mention Indian disease as a factor at Plymouth or anywhere in New England.”

pg 87 “Some historians believe Gorges took credit for landing in Massachusetts after the fact. Indeed, the Mayflower may have had no specific destination. Readers might be fascinated if textbook authors presented two or more of the various possibilities, but as usual, exposing students to historical controversy is taboo. Each textbook picks just one reason and presents it as fact.”

pg 89 “In their pious treatment of the Pilgrims, history textbooks introduce the archetype of American exceptionalism. According to //The American Pageant//, “This rare opportunity for a great social and political experiment may never come again.” //The American Way// declares, “The American people have created a unique nation.” How is America exceptional? Surely we’re exceptionally //good//. As Woodrow Wilson put it, “America is the only idealistic nation in the world.” And the goodness started at Plymouth Rock, according to our textbooks, which view the Pilgrims as Christian, sober, democratic, generous to the Indians, God-thanking. Such a happy portrait can be painted only by omitting the facts about the plague, the possible hijacking, and the Indian relations.”

pg 89 “For that matter, our culture and our textbooks underplay or omit Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States.”

pg 90 “Textbooks indeed cover the Virginia colony, and they at least mention the Spanish settlements, but they devote 50 percent more space to Massachusetts. As a result, and due also to Thanksgiving, of course, students are more likely to remember the Pilgrims as our founders.”


 * __Chapter 4__:**
 * Red Eyes**

pg 99 “There has been some improvement in textbooks’ treatment of Native peoples in recent years. In 1961 the best-selling //Rise of the American Nation// contained ten illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations); most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage warfare. Twenty-five years later, the retitled //Triumph of the American Nation// contained fifteen illustrations of Indians; more important, no longer were Native Americans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were people who participated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land….”

pg 99 “Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks “need a crash course in cultural relativism and ethnic sensitivity,” according to James Axtell, who criticized textbooks in 1987 for still using such terms as //half-breed, massacre//, and //war-whooping//.  milder terms such as //frontier initiative// and //settlers// for whites is equally biased. Even worse are the authors’ overall interpretations, which continue to be shackled by the “conventional assumptions and semantics” that have “explained” Indian-white relations for centuries. Textbook authors still write history to comfort descendants of the “settlers.”

pg 102 “Today’s textbooks do confer civilization on some Natives. Like the Spanish conquistadors themselves, //The American Adventure// equates wealth and civilization: “Unlike the noncivilized peoples of the Caribbean, the Aztec were rich and prosperous.” Textbooks invariably put the civilization far away, in Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru. By comparison, “Indian life in North America was less advanced,” says //The American Pageant//. It seems that, despite good intentions, textbooks cannot resist contrasting “primitive” Americans with modern Europeans. Part of the problem is that the books are really comparing rural America to urban Europe-Massachusetts to London.

pg 102 “For a long time Native Americans have been rebuking textbook authors for  the adjective //civilized// for European cultures. In 1927 an organization of Native leaders called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians criticized textbooks as “unjust to the life of our people.” They went on to ask, “What is civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts, stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we are not savages, but a civilized race.”

pg 105 “I had expected to find in our textbooks the cliché that Native Americans did not make good slaves, but only two books; //Triumph of the American Nation// and //The American Tradition//, say even that. //The American Pageant// contains a paragraph that at least states the basics-“Indian slaves were among the colony’s earliest exports”-even if it gives no hint of the trade’s extent. //American History// buries a sentence, “A few Indians were enslaved,” in its discussion of the African slave trade. Otherwise, the twelve textbooks are silent on the subject of the Native American slave trade.”

pg 107 “To be anthropologically literate about culture contact, students should be familiar with the terms //syncretism// and //cultural imperialism//, or at least the concepts they denote. None of the twelve textbooks mentions either term, and most of them explain nothing of the process of cultural change, again except for the Plains Indian horse culture, which, as a consequence, comes across as unique. Not one textbook tells of the process of incorporation into the global economy, none tells how contact worked to deskill Native Americans, most don’t tell of increased Indian warfare, and only //The American Pageant// even hints at the extent of the Native American slave trade.”

pg 107 “Just as American societies change when they encountered whites, so European societies change when they encountered Natives. Textbooks completely miss this side of the mutual  acculturation process. Instead, their view of white-Indian relations is dominated by the archetype of the frontier line. Textbooks present the process as a moving line of white (and black) settlement-Indians on one side, whites (and blacks) on the other.”

pg 112 “For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-ear cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain…. When colonists took action to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Part or the anti-rent protests against Dutch plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840s, they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.”

pg 113 “Acknowledging how aboriginal we are culturally-how the United States and Europe, too, have been influenced by Native Americans as well as European ideas-would require significant textbook rewriting.”

pg 117 My college students still come up with //savage// when I ask them for five adjectives that apply to [|royal1688] Indians.”

pg 121 “Even in describing the French and Indian War, textbooks leave out the Indians! One of the worst defeats Indians ever inflicted on white forces was the rout of General Braddock in 1755 in Pennsylvania.”

pg 124 “Like its predecessors, the War of 1812 cannot be understood so long as its Indian origin is obscured. Whites along the frontier wanted the war, and along the frontier most of the war was fought, beginning in November 1811 with William Henry Harrison’s attack on the Shawnees and allied tribes in Indiana, called the Battle of Tippecanoe. The United States fought five of the seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against Native Americans. Nonetheless, unlike Canadian histories, none of our textbooks recognizes the involvement of Native Americans.”

pg 130 ““No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. “Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except on its periphery.””

pg 133 “It is understandable that textbook authors might write history in such a way that students can feel good about themselves by feeling good about the past. Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Native Americans.”

pg 134 “Ant-Indian racism has eased considerably in the twentieth century. Ironically, the very fact that the United States is beginning to let Natives acculturate successfully, albeit on Anglo terms, poses a new threat to Native coexistence. Poverty and discrimination helped isolate Indians. If Native Americans can now get good jobs, as some can, buy new vehicles and satellite televisions, as some have, and commute to the city for part of their life, as some do, it is much harder to maintain the intangible values that make up the core of Indian cultures.”


 * __Chapter 5:__**
 * “Gone with the Wind:” The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks//**

//pg 138// //“American history textbooks cannot be faltered for not mentioning that the first non-Native settlers in the United States were black. Educationally, however, the incident has its uses. It shows that Africans (is it too early to call them African Americans?) rebelled against slavery from the first. It points to the important subject of the three-way race relations-Indian-African-European-which most textbooks completely omit. It teaches that slavery cannot readily survive without secure borders. And, symbolically, it illustrates that African Americans, and the attendant subject of black-white race relations, were part of American history from the first Europeans to settle.”//

//pg 138// //“Perhaps the most persuasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life. Issues of black-white relations propelled the Whig Party to collapse, prompted the formation of the Republican Party, and caused the Democratic Party to label itself the “white man’s party” for almost a century.”//

//pg 140// //“Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two centuries America’s most popular novel was set in slavery-//Uncle Tom’s Cabin //by Harriet Beecher Stowe and// Gone with the Wind //by Margaret Mitchell. The two books tell very different stories:// Uncle Tom’s Cabin //presents slavery as an evil to be opposed, while// Gone with the Wind //suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing is to be lamented. Until the civil rights movement, American history textbooks in this century pretty much agreed with Mitchell. In 1959 my high school textbook presented slavery as not such a bad thing.”//

//pg 141// //“History  admit that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. In the words of// The United States-A History of the Republic//, “At the center of the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away.” Before the civil rights movement, many textbooks held that almost anything else-differences over tariffs and internal improvements, blundering politicians, the conflict between the agrarian South and the industrial North-caused the war. This was a form of Southern apologetics. Among the twelve textbooks I reviewed, only// Triumph of the American Nation//, a book that originated in the 1950s, still holds such a position.”//

//pg 142// //“Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.”//

//pg 142// //“Most textbooks downplay slavery in the North, however, so slavery seems to be a sectional rather than a national problem. Indeed, even the expanded coverage of slavery comes across as an unfortunate but minor blemish, compared to the overall story line of our textbooks.”//

//pg 143// //“To function adequately in civic life in our troubled times, students must learn what causes racism. Although it is a complicated historical issue, racism in the Western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work that land. To teach this relationship, textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system.”//

//pg 144// //“The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom. In its core our culture tells us-tells all of us, including African Americans-that Europe’s domination of the world came about because the Europeans were smarter.”//

//pg 145// //Only two textbooks discuss what might have caused racism. The closest any of the textbooks comes to explaining the connection between slavery and racism is this single sentence from// The American Tradition//: “In defense of their ‘peculiar institution,’ southerners became more and more determined to maintain their own way of life.” Such a statement hardly suffices to show today’s students the origin of racism in our society-it doesn’t even use the word!”//

//pg 145// //““Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how slavery affected African Americans, they minimize white complicity in it. They present slavery virtually as uncaused, a tragedy, rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on other. Textbooks maintain the fiction that planters did the work on the plantations. “There was always much work to be done,” according to// Triumph of the American Nation//, “for a cotton grower also raised most of the food eaten by his family and slaves.””//

//pg 152// //“For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination. Textbooks cannot show the influence of slavery on our foreign policy if they are unwilling to talk about ideas like racism that might make whites look bad. When textbook authors turn their attention to domestic policy, racism remains similarly invisible.”//

//pg 160// //““Since textbooks find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity.// Triumph //presents the end of Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans: “Other northerners grew weary of the problems of black southerners and less willing to help them learn their new roles as citizens.”// The American Adventure //echoes: “Millions of ex-salves could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and businessmen.””//

//pg 162// //““Describing the 1954 Supreme Court decision [(//Plessy v. Ferguson//)] that would begin to undo// //segregation,// The American Way //says, “No separate school could truly be equal for Blacks,” but offers no clue as to why this would be so.””//

//pg 166// //“Some historians date low black morale to even later periods, such as the great migration to Northern cities (1918-70), the Depression (1929-39), or changes in urban life and occupational structure after World War II. Unfortunately, no textbook discusses the changing levels of white racism or black reaction in// any //of these periods.”//

//pg 170// //“High school students “have a gloomy view of the state of race relations in America today,” according to a recent nationwide poll. Students of all racial backgrounds brood about the subject. Another poll reveals that for the first time in this century, young white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward black Americans than those over thirty. One reason is that “the under-30 generation is pathetically ignorant of recent American history.” Too young to have experienced or watched the civil rights movements as it happened, these young people have no understanding of the past and present working of racism in American society.”//

//**__Chapter 6:__**// //**John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Antiracism in American History Textbooks**

pg 172 “Just as textbooks treat slavery without racism, they treat abolitionism without idealism. Consider the most radical white abolitionist of them all, John Brown.”

pg 172 “The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he regained his sanity. Since Brown himself did not change after his death, his sanity provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society.”

pg 174 “We must recognize that the insanity with which historians have charged John Brown was never psychological. It was ideological. Brown’s actions made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and about 1970. To make no sense is to be crazy.”

pg 176 “Brown’s charisma in the North [sic] was not spent but only increased due to what many came to view as his martyrdom. As the war came, as thousands of Americans found themselves making the same commitment to face death that John Brown had made, the force of his example took on new relevance.”

pg 177 “Quite possibly textbooks should not portray this murderer as a hero, although other murderers, from Christopher Columbus to Nat Turner, get the heroic treatment. However, the flat prose that textbooks use for Brown is not really neutral. Textbook authors’ withdrawal of sympathy from Brown is perceptible; their tone in presenting him is different from the tone they employ for almost everyone else.”

pg 178 “Our textbooks also handicap Brown by not letting him speak for himself. Even his jailer let Brown put pen to paper! //American History// includes three important sentences; //American Adventures// gives us almost two. //The American Pageant// reprints three sentences from a letter Brown wrote his brother. The other nine books do not provide even a phrase. Brown’s words, which moved a nation, therefore do not move students today.”

pg 179 “Conceivably, textbook authors ignore John Brown’s ideas because in their eyes his violent acts make him ineligible for sympathetic consideration.”

pg 183 ““Lincoln, like most whites of his century, referred to blacks as “niggers.” In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he sometimes descended into explicit white supremacy…. Lincoln’s attitudes about race were more complicated than Douglas’s however. The day after Douglas declared for white supremacy in Chicago, saying the issues were “distinctly drawn,” Lincoln replied and indeed drew the issue distinctly: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it-where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why does not another say it does not mean some other man? If that Declaration is not…true, let us tear it out! [Cries of “no, no!”] Let us stick to it them, let us stand firmly by it then.” No textbook quotes this passage, and every book but one leaves out Lincoln’s thundering summation of what his debates with Douglas were really about: “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world.””

pg 183 “As president, Lincoln understood the importance of symbolic leadership in improving race relations.”

pg 185 “Abraham Lincoln was one of the great masters of the English language. Perhaps more than any other president he invoked and manipulated powerful symbols in his speeches to move public opinion, often on the subject of race relations and slavery. Textbooks in keeping with their habit of telling everything in the authorial monotone, dribble out Lincoln’s words three and four at a time.”

pg 187-188 “Textbooks need not explain Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg as I have done. The Gettysburg Address is rich enough to survive various analyses. But of the four books that do reprint the speech, three merely put it in a box by itself in a corner of the page. Only Life and Liberty asks intelligent questions about it. As a result, I have yet to meet a high school graduate who has devoted any time to thinking about the Gettysburg Address.”

pg 190 The antiracist repercussions of the Civil War were particularly apparent in the border states. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederacy. It left slavery untouched in Unionist Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. But the war did not. The status of planters became ambiguous: owning black people was no longer what a young white man aspired to do or what a young white woman aspired to accomplish by marriage.”

pg 192 “Songs such as “Nigger Doodle Dandy” reflect the racist tone of the Democrats’ presidential campaign in 1864. How did republicans counter? In part, they sought white votes by being antiracist. The Republican campaign, boosted by military victories in the fall of 1864, proved effective. The Democrats’ overt appeals to racism failed, and antiracist Republicans triumphed almost everywhere.”

pg 203 “Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying. Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.” [etc.]…Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes. Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that we might again value our own idealism.”

__**Chapter 7:**__
 * The Land of Opportunity**

pg 201 “High school students have eyes, ears, and television sets (all too man have their own TV sets), so they know a lot about relative privilege in American. They measure their family’s social position against that of other families, and their community’s position against other communities. Middle-class students, especially, know little about how the American class structure works, however, and nothing at all about how it has changed over time. These students do not leave high school merely ignorant of the workings of the class structure; they come out as terrible sociologists….The students blame the poor for not being successful. They have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal in America and no notion that social structure pushes people around, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion.”

pg 201 “High school textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affairs. Some textbooks cover certain high points of labor history, such as the 1894 Pullman strike near Chicago…or the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 women in New York City, but the most recent event mentioned in most books is the Taft-Hartley Act of fifty years ago. No book mentions the Hormel meat-packers strike in the mid-1980’s or the air traffic controllers’ strike broken by President Reagan. Nor do textbooks described any continuing issues facing labor…”

pg 202 “Six of the dozen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for “social class,” “social stratification,” “class structure,” “income distribution,” “inequality,” or any conceivably related topic.”

pg 203 “There is almost nothing in any of these textbooks about class inequalities or barriers of any kine to social mobility. “What conditions made it possible for poor white immigrants to become richer in the colonies?” //Land// //of Promise// asks. “What conditions made/make it difficult?” goes unasked.”

pg 203 “Social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people that we can measure. Affluent expectant mothers are more likely to get prenatal care, enjoy general health, fitness, and nutrition. Many poor and working-class mothers-to-be first contact the medical profession in the last month… Rich babies come out healthier and go home to very different situations… Poor babies are more likely to have high levels of poisonous lead in their environments and their bodies… Rich children benefit from suburban schools that spend two to three times as much money per student as schools in inner cities or rural areas. Differences such as these help account for the higher school-dropout rate among poor children.”

pg 208 “The tendency of teachers and textbooks to avoid social class as if it were a dirty littler secret only reinforces the reluctance of working-class families to talk about it.”

pg 211 “Why might they commit such a blunder? First and foremost, publisher censorship of textbook authors. “You always run the risk, if you talk about social class, of being labeled Marxist,” the editor for social studies and history at one of the biggest publishing houses told me.”

pg 212 “But isn’t it nice simply to believe that America is equal? Maybe the “land of opportunity” archetype is an empowering myth—maybe believing might even help make it come true.”

pg 213 “One way things are is unequal by social class. Although poor and working-class children usually cannot identify the cause of their alienation, history often turn them off because it justifies rather than explains the present.”

__**Chapter 8**__
 * Watching Big Brother:** //What Textbooks Teach about the Federal Government//

pg 215 “//Land of Promise// grants each president a biographical vignette, even William Henry Harrison (who served for one month), but never mentioning arguably our greatest composer, Charles Ives; our most influential architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; or our most prominent non-Indian humanitarian on behalf of Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson.”

pg 215-216 “What story do textbooks tell about our government? First, they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the states, and  some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the last two hundred years. The federal government they picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable.”

pg 217 “In Frances FitzGerald’s phrase, textbooks present United States as “a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world.” In so doing, they echo the nation our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely moral, disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen.”

pg 217 “Since at least the 1920’s, textbook authors have claimed that the United States is more generous than any other nation in the world in providing foreign aid. The myth was untrue then; it is likewise untrue now. Today at least a dozen European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total government expenditures to foreign aid than does the United States.”

pg 220-221 “Textbook authors portray the U.S. government’s actions as agreeable and nice, even when U.S. government officials have admitted motives and intentions of a quite different nature…. I surveyed the twelve textbooks to see how they treated six more recent U.S. attempts to subvert foreign governments. To ensure that the events were adequately covered in the historical literature, I examined only incidents that occurred before 1973, well before any of these textbooks went to press. The episodes are: //**Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;**// //**2. our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;** //**4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;** //**6. our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile 1973.**// //The U.S. government calls actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism” when other countries do them to us.”//
 * 1. our assistance to the shah’s faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister//**
 * 3. our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;//**
 * 5. our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and//**

//pg 235// //"The textbooks' sycopathic presentations of the federal government may help win adoptions, but they don't win students' attention. It is boring to read about all the good things the government did on its own, with no dramatic struggles.... Nor can the textbook authors' servile approach to the government teach students to be effective citizens."//

//**__Chapter 9__**// //**Down the Memory Hole:**// The Disappearance of the Recent Past

//pg 239// //“Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha—of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, which may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better.//

//pg 240// //“I examined how the ten narrative American histories in my sample cover in the five decades leading up to the 1980s. On average, the textbooks give 47 pages to the 1930s, 43.6 pages to the 1940s, and fewer than 35 pages to each later decade. Even the turbulent decade of the 1960s—including the civil rights movement, most of the Vietnam War, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy—gets fewer than 35 pages.”//

//pg 243// //-In regards to famous images from the Vietnam War that don’t make it into textbooks-// //“However, the images have additional claims to historical significance: they made history, for they affected the way Americans thought about the war…As a student of mine wrote, “To show a photograph of one naked girl crying after she has been napalmed changes the entire meaning of that war to a high school student”.”//

//pg 251// //“Textbook authors are not solely responsible for the slighting of the recent past in high school history courses. Even if textbooks gave the sasha the space it deserves, most students would have to read about it on their own, because most teachers never get to the end of the textbook. Time is not the only problem. Like publishers, teachers do not want to risk offending parents. Moreover, according to Linda McNeil, most teachers particularly don’t want to teach about Vietnam. “Their memories of the Vietnam war era made them wish to avoid topics on which the students were likely to disagree with their views or that would make the students ‘cynical’ about American institutions”.”//

//pg 252// //“ “The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even the past.” The sasha is our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them.”//

//**__Chapter 10__**// //**Progress Is Our Most Important Product**//

//pg 255// //“Even textbooks that don’t end with their titles close with the same vapid cheer. “The American spirit surged with vitality as the nation headed toward the close of the twentieth century,” the authors of// The American Pageant //assure us, ignoring opinion polls that suggest the opposite.”//

//pg 255-256// //“As usual, such content-free unanimity signals that a social archetype lurks nearby. This one, the archetype of progress, bursts forth in full flower on the textbooks’ last pages but has been germinating from their opening chapters. For centuries American viewed their own history as a demonstration of the idea of progress. The idea of progress dominated American culture in the nineteenth century and was still being celebrated in Chicago at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933.”//

//pg 257// //“Growth meant progress and progress provided meaning, in some basic but unthinking way.”//

//pg 262// //“Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with a corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America’s cause is the cause of all humankind. Thus our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will// never //achieve our standard of living, for if they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it// less //likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.”//

//pg 267// //“…belief in progress makes students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. To conclude that other cultures have achieved little about which we need to know is a natural side effect of believing our society is the most progressive.”//

//pg 268// //“ High school history and social studies courses could help open students to ideas from other cultures. That does not happen, however, because the idea of progress saturates these courses from Columbus to their final words. Therefore they can only promote, not diminish ethnocentrism.”//

//pg 270// //“E.J. Mishan has suggested that feeding students rosy tales of automatic progress helps keep them passive, for it presents the future as a process over which they have no control. I don’t believe this is why textbooks end as the do, however. Their upbeat endings may best be understood as ploys by publishers who hope that nationalist optimism will get their books adopted. Such endings really amount to concessions of defeat, however. By implying that no real questions about our future need be asked and no real thinking about trends in our history need be engaged in, textbook authors concede implicitly that our history has no serious bearing on our future. We can hardly fault students for concluding that the study of history is irrelevant.”//

//**__Chapter 11__**// //**Why Is History Taught Like This?**// //pg 272// //“Ten chapters have shown that textbooks supply irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues ranging from Columbus’s second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide. We have also seen that history textbooks offer students no practice in applying their understanding of the past to present concerns, hence n basis for thinking rationally about anything in the future. Reality gets lost as authors stray further and further from the primary sources and even the secondary literature. Textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each side bases its position.”//

//pg 272// //“Despite criticisms by scholars, from Frances FitzGerald to Diane Ravitch and Harriet Tyson-Bernstein, new editions of old texts come out year after year, largely unchanged.”//

//pg 272// //“In 1925 the American Legion declaimed that the ideal textbook://

//**-must inspire the children with patriotism**// //**-must be careful to tell the truth optimistically**// //**-must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success…**// //**-must give each State and section full space and value for the achievements of each.**

Shirley Engle and Anna Ochoa are longtime luminaries of social studies education who in 1986 voiced their recommendations for textbooks. From their vantage point, the ideal textbook should:


 * -confront students with important questions and problems for which answers are not readily available;**
 * -be highly selective;**
 * -be organized around an important problem in society that is to be studied in depth;**
 * -utilize… data from a variety of sources such as history, the social sciences, literature, journalism, and from students’ first-hand experiences**

Today’s textbooks hew closely to the American Legion line and disregard the recommendations of Engle and Ochoa. WHY?”

pg 275 “ “Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education,” according to William L. Griffen and John Marciano, who analyzed textbook treatment of the Vietnam War.


 * By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War.**
 * …Within history texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities.**

Here in polite academic language, Griffen and Marciano tell us that controlling elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to keep us ignorant and stupid.”

pg 277 “…if textbooks are devised by the upper class to manipulate youngsters to support the status quo, they hardly seem to be succeeding. Evidence suggests that history textbooks and courses make little impact in increasing trust in the United States or inducing good citizenship, however these are measured. Voting is the one form of citizenship that the textbooks push, yet voting in America is way down, especially among recent high school graduates. The fact that social studies and history courses give citizenship such a sanctimonious tinge may help explain why fewer than 17 percent of eligible voters aged eighteen to twenty-four voted in 1986.”

pg 283 “In interviews with me, publishing executives blamed adoption boards, school administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to please, for the distortions and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks. Parents, whether black militants, or Texas conservatives, blame publishers. Teachers blame administrators who make them use distasteful books of the publishers who produced them. But authors blame no one. They claim credit for their books.”

pg 283 “I asked John Garraty, author of //American History//, why he omitted the plague in New England that devastated Indian societies before the Pilgrims came. “I didn’t know about it,” was his straightforward reply.

pg 287 “Teachers rarely say “I don’t know” in class and rarely discuss how one might then find the answer. “I don’t know” violates a norm. The teacher, like the textbook, is //supposed// to know. Students, for their part, are supposed to learn what teachers and textbooks authors already know.

It is hard for teachers to teach open-endedly. They are afraid not to be in control of the answer, afraid of losing their authority over the class. To avoid exposing gaps in their knowledge, teachers allow their students to make “very little us of the school’s extensive resources,” according to researcher Linda McNeil, who completed three studies of high school social studies classes between 1975 and 1981.”


 * __Chapter 12__**
 * What is the Result of Teaching History Like This?**

pg 300 “When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South //Korea//, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even the details of American history that textbooks and teachers stress. Still less are they learning to apply lessons from the past to current issues. Students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office, sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

pg 300-301 “Earlier chapters have shown, however, that American history textbooks and courses are neither dispassionate nor passionate. All textbook authors and many teachers seem not to have thought deeply about just what in our past might be worthy of passion, or even serious contemplation. No //real// emotion seeps into these books, not even real pride.”

pg 301 “Another way to cause history to stick is to present it so that it touches students’ lives. To show students how racism affects African Americans, a teacher in Iowa discriminated by eye color among members of her all-white class of third-graders for two days. By stressing the distant past, textbooks discourage students from seeking to learn history from their families or community, which again disconnects school from the other parts of students’ lives.”

pg 309-310 “Students who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than other students. The same is true in English, foreign language studies, and almost every other subject. Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less schooling. Why do students buy into the mindless “analysis” they encounter in American history courses? For some students, it is in their ideological interest. Upper-middle-class students are comforted by a view of society that emphasizes schooling as the solution to intolerance, poverty, even perhaps war. Such a rosy view of education and its effects lets them avoid considering the need to make major changes in other institutions.”

pg 310 “Students also have short-term reasons for accepting what teachers and textbooks tell them about the social world in their history and social studies classes, of course. They are going to be tested on it. It is in the students’ interest just to learn the material. Arguing takes more energy.”

pg 310-311 “In the long run, however, “learning” history this way is not really satisfying. History textbooks and most high school history teachers give students no reason to love or appreciate the subject. We must not ignore the abysmal ratings that history courses receive, and we cannot merely exhort students to like history more. But this does not mean the sorry state of learning in most history classrooms cannot be changed. Students will start learning history when they see the point of doing so, when it seems interesting and important to them, and when they believe history might relate to their lives and futures.”

pg 311 “Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.”

__**Key Terminology**__


 * Chapter 1:**
 * Heroification-** According to Loewen, "A degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Throughout this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest." (p. 19)
 * Vignette-** a short, descriptive piece of writing.
 * Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)-** the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.
 * Humanitarian-** people who are ignorant, simply saw Helen Keller as this: committed to improving the lives of other people.
 * Archetypes-** these specific ideals people have of famous figures in history, but they are inaccurate.
 * Chapter 2:**
 * Process of Domination-** when a group of people dominates another. For example, when Christopher Columbus landed on the American shores.
 * Efflorescence-** when contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering.
 * The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)-** when Portugal insisted on moving the pope's "line of demarcation" further west.
 * Cognitive Dissonance-** According to Loewen, "Although the Indians may have changed from hospitable to angry, they could hardly have evolved from intelligent to stupid so quickly. The change had to be in Columbus.
 * Chapter 3:**
 * The Black Plague-** In the years 1348 through 1350, it killed perhaps 30 percent of the population of Europe.
 * The Mayflower Compact-** it provided a democratic basis for the Plymouth colony.
 * Chapter 4:**
 * Syncretism-** the combination of different beliefs and merging of different inflectional forms.
 * Acculturation-** The Europeans wanted to change the Indians culture and thinking to their own. The Indians’ culture was from birth and part of their society.
 * Chapter 5:**
 * Segregation-** a system of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for white employers.
 * Chapter 6:**
 * Abolitionist-** antislavery campaigners working to abolish slavery. Brown and Lincoln were considered abolitionists during their time.
 * Chapter 8:**
 * Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—** total government expenditures to foreign aid.
 * Chapter 9:**
 * Sasha-** A belief in African societies: The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here, also known as the living dead. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead.
 * Chapter 10:**
 * Archetype-** is a generic, idealized model of a person, object, or concept from which similar instances are derived, copied, patterned, or emulated.
 * Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-** was the name of a World's Fair held in Chicago, Illinois from 1933–1934 to celebrate Chicago's centennial. The theme of the fair was technological innovation.
 * Ecocide-** means destroying our ecosystem by actions of the human species.
 * Hegemony-** is a concept that has been used to describe the existence of dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group—referred to as a **hegemon**—acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.