Lies My Teacher Told Me

12. WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS? I do not know if there is any other field of knowledge which suffers so badly as history fr ...

They hired somebody. I don’t remember the man’s name. —BROOKS MATHER KELLEY, COAUTHOR, A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, EXPLAININ ...

intended readers: students. Their characteristics, as publishers perceive them, particularly affect reading level and page layou ...

was overtly anti-Semitic and antiblack. According to Peter Novick, whose book That Noble Dream is the best recent account of the ...

about who determines the way history is written: “Who controls the present controls the past.”^14 The symbolic representation of ...

“critical theory.”^16 Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, “School is in business to produce reliable people.”^17 Pa ...

of the upper class. To blame the power elite for what is taught in a rural Vermont school or an inner-city classroom is too easy ...

minimize the inhumanity of the institution.^25 Perhaps we must conclude, mixing a metaphor, that the power elite did not have it ...

be even more immediate. Moreover, states without textbook boards constitute smaller markets, since publishers must win approval ...

apply to each book—an Augean stable. Since they have time only to flip through most books, they look for easy readability, newne ...

and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” As a historical statement, that caption is questi ...

the page crease. Then comes a heading, “Section 1,” in a little golden egg, and “Road to War.” Still the chapter does not start; ...

careers in publishing as sales representatives. They are not historians, but they know their market. They make sure their books ...

hence “rebels.” But Pageant did “exceptionally well” in Southern states, so who cares? Only after the civil rights movement did ...

meant as a shot across the bow of “liberal” professors who “interpret” the past rather than “telling it like it was.” Its author ...

American Schoolbook.^41 In American history, even more than in literature, publishers strive for a “balanced” approach to offend ...

people listed as authors on some other textbooks have even less to do with them. Some teachers and historians merely rent their ...

and neither candidate captured the 270 electoral votes needed to win. One undecided state, Florida, would give either candidate ...

letters.... —A History of the United States What is happening here? Do we imagine that Boorstin and Kelley cribbed from Cayton, ...

are the same as those in another history textbook, he was taken aback. “That’s terrible!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if they hired ...