Lies My Teacher Told Me

and about 1970. To make no sense is to be crazy. At left is John Brown as he appeared in 1858. He looked like a middle-aged busi ...

1859 trial John Brown captured the attention of the nation like no other abolitionist or slave owner before or since. He knew it ...

be strengthened from on high.”^16 When Virginia executed John Brown on December 2, making him the first American since the found ...

enough of its racism to accept that a white person did not have to be crazy to die for black equality. In a sense, the murders o ...

who took its moral commands to heart. Yet every recent textbook except Pathways to the Present does not credit Brown with religi ...

at Osawatomie, Kansas, Brown had helped thirty-five free-soil men defend themselves against several hundred marauding pro-slaver ...

except perhaps Thomas Jefferson, and, unlike Jefferson, Lincoln’s actions sometimes matched his words. Most of our textbooks say ...

torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” Lincoln concluded that the m ...

By emphasizing this quote, most textbooks present a Lincoln who was morally indifferent to slavery and certainly did not care ab ...

danger of foreign intervention on the side of the Confederacy.” To be sure, international and domestic political concerns did im ...

fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are cre ...

result, I have yet to meet a high school graduate who has devoted any time to thinking about the Gettysburg Address. The strange ...

offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills ...

Must we remember Lincoln for that? Let’s leave it out! Such an approach to Lincoln might be called the Walt Disney interpretatio ...

crew of the USS Hunchback in the Civil War. Such racial integration disappeared during the nadir of race relations in the United ...

Opposite: This is the October 15, 1864, centerfold of Harper’s magazine, which throughout the nineteenth century was the mouthpi ...

...

The Democratic platform began innocuously enough: “We will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the UNION under the CONSTITUTION a ...

Charles Summer, speaking as the war wound down.^50 Illustrating “PUBLIC LIBERTY and PRIVATE RIGHT,” Nast shows the New York City ...

south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.^51 Throughout the war, points out histor ...