Lies My Teacher Told Me

transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, aft ...

imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we’re smarter. (It’s interesting to speculate as to who, exactly, is this “ ...

inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and sailed all the way around Africa before 600 BC. Instead, the textbooks credit Bartolomeu ...

While the list is long, it is still probably incomplete. A map found in Turkey dated 1513 and said to be based on material from ...

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New evidence that emerges, as archaeologists, historians, and biologists compare American cultures and life forms with cultures ...

Most textbooks that mention the Viking expeditions minimize them. Land of Promise writes, “They merely touched the shore briefly ...

Perhaps around the same time, natives elsewhere in Mexico created small ceramic and stone sculptures of what seem to be Caucasoi ...

reprinted more than twenty times, and he is lionized by black undergraduates across America. Rap music groups chant “but we alre ...

heads six to ten feet tall. Wherever they were from, the human models for these heads were important people, people to be worshi ...

Gama by more than two thousand years. Does the teacher take time to research the question and find that the student is right, th ...

transatlantic trade—washed up on Cape Verde. From contacts in West Africa, the Portuguese heard that African traders were visiti ...

Not one textbook—old or new—mentions the West Africans, however. While leaving out Columbus’s predecessors, American history boo ...

What about Columbus’s class background? One textbook tells us he was poor, “the son of a poor Genoese weaver,” while another ass ...

horizon, hull first, then sails. Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in 1828. In his bestselling ...

the point that these images are inauthentic, the Library of Congress sells this T- shirt featuring six different Columbus faces. ...

American culture perpetuates the image of Columbus boldly forging ahead while everyone else imagined the world was flat. A chara ...

“immediately appreciated” Columbus’s “discoveries,” which is why they immediately outfitted him for a much larger second voyage. ...

As Columbus cruised the coast of Venezuela on his third voyage, he passed the Orinoco River. “I have come to believe that this i ...

To make a better myth, the textbooks describe Columbus’s ships as tiny and inefficient, when actually “these three vessels were ...