Lies My Teacher Told Me

Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries w ...

society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our abilit ...

pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. To my astonishment, during the last twelve years they grew even larger. In 2006 I surv ...

who must read them, so they provide elaborate introductions and enticements, beginning with the table of contents. For The Ameri ...

follow each chapter. At year’s end, no student can remember 840 main ideas, not to mention 890 terms and countless other factoid ...

materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting ...

written not by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher’s offices. When histo ...

some ghastly—in American history, including a new chapter on our two Iraq wars and the continuing “war on terrorism.” Arranged i ...

community, and, of course, a nation and a culture. Sociologists understand the power of social structure and culture to shape no ...

1. HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY THE PROCESS OF HERO-MAKING What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ...

—W.E.B. DUBOIS^2 By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves.... We fail to recognize tha ...

happens to the heroes when they are introduced into our history textbooks and our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans pr ...

became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke”—co ...

Always a voice for the voiceless, Helen Keller championed women’s suffrage. Her position at the head of this 1912 demonstration ...

Keller’s research was not just book learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I cou ...

When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that W ...

show the interrelationship between the hero and the people. By giving the credit to the hero, authors tell less than half of the ...

that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance.”^12 This aggression fueled the suspicions th ...

President Wilson stood firm against demands to step in.” Soon Wilson did order troops to Mexico, of course, even before Congress ...

killing of natives has gone on for some time.” Barnett termed this violent episode “the most startling thing of its kind that ha ...