Lies My Teacher Told Me

blacks would hardly fight like white men. The undeniable bravery of the 54th Massachusetts and other black regiments disproved t ...

to the very end still had great resources and manpower.” Many nations and people have continued to fight with far inferior means ...

preservation of their rights and freedom to decide for themselves.” Nobody fought to preserve racial slavery; nobody fought to e ...

jewel of our Constitution shows how idealistic were the officeholders of the Republican Party, particularly when we consider tha ...

The white woman at left, whom textbooks would call a “carpetbagger,” could hardly expect to grow rich teaching school near Vicks ...

Gettysburg, also became Republicans because they had grown convinced that equality for blacks was morally right. Robert Flournoy ...

the words as if they were proper historical labels, with no quotation marks. Consider this phrase from Pathways to the Present l ...

betrayers of their race and country.” The new treatment distances the author from the derogatory terms, putting them in the mout ...

hour came for dealing with slavery, as Lincoln had surmised, he had done his duty and it had cost his life.^77 Abraham Lincoln, ...

While John Brown was on trial, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of Brown’s place in history. Phillips foresaw that slaver ...

7. THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never h ...

—HELEN KELLER^2 Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can’t buy enough to eat. —WILL ROGERS, 1931 The ...

New York City, but the most recent event mentioned in most books is the Taft- Hartley Act of sixty years ago. No book mentions a ...

under conditions not so different from a century ago, and often in the same locations. These books’ poor treatment of labor hist ...

America “social classes were much more fluid.” “One great difference between colonial and European society was that the colonist ...

Even when poor children are fortunate enough to attend the same school as rich children, they encounter teachers who expect only ...

important tax shelter, the write-off of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivision ...

following theories that emphasized government as a bulwark of the propertied class. Although rich himself, James Madison worried ...

working-class images. Advertisers use upper-middle-class imagery to sell most items, from wine to nylons to toilet-bowl cleanser ...

and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of ...