Lies My Teacher Told Me

intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chi ...

his Cabinet officers to extend the Jim Crow practice of separating the races in federal offices” is the entire treatment in Path ...

gatherings in their history, before or since. During Wilson’s second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whi ...

’76, a film about the Revolutionary War that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably.^27 Textbook authors sug ...

To oppose America’s participation in World War I, or even to be pessimistic about it, was dangerous. The Creel Committee asked a ...

shortcomings, textbooks are hard-pressed to explain the results of the 1920 election. James Cox, the Democratic candidate who wa ...

freedom and natural rights for all mankind.”^33 I think Frisch is onto something, but maybe he is merely on something. Whether o ...

This statue of George Washington, now in the Smithsonian Institution, exemplifies the manner in which textbooks would portray ev ...

Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes to make certain histor ...

himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance ...

speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when we’re passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don ...

Columbus, Miles Standish or anyone else in Plymouth, John Smith or anyone else in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone el ...

published in 1828, still influences what high school teachers and textbooks say about the Great Navigator. Therefore, it will co ...

2. 1493 THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS Columbus is above all the figure with whom the Modern Age—the age by which w ...

possibility that our founding father was a black man. —SAMUEL D. MARBLE^2 History is the polemics of the victor. —WILLIAM F. BUC ...

Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus so readers will identify ...

omissions that is in large part traceable to the first half of the nineteenth century. The textbooks’ first mistake is to underp ...

even use the same phrases. Overall, the level of scholarship is discouragingly low, perhaps because their authors are more at ho ...

11, 2001, reinforce this archetype of a threatening Islam. College students today are therefore astonished to learn that Turks a ...

“weapons of mass destruction” to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and keep them out of the hands of terrorists like al-Qaeda. Since m ...