archetypes. Mircea Eliade has referred to “the inability of collective memory
to retain historical events except insofar as it transforms them into
archetypes.”^10 Truth, to be retained, must be given the same mythic significance
that we have given our lies.
For this reason, I find myself tongue-tied when teachers ask what textbook I
recommend. Perhaps no traditional textbook can be written that will empower
rather than bore us with history.
What, then, is to be done?
The portrait of lying painted in the last two chapters as a vertically
integrated industry, including textbook boards, publishers, authors, teachers,
stu-dents, and the public, may appear bleak. It follows, however, that
intervention can occur at any point in the cycle. The next few paragraphs are
directed particularly toward teachers, who can intervene even in the absence
of transformed textbooks. Those of us not in the classroom can play a role in
changing how history is taught by supporting teachers who put innovative
approaches into practice.
Throughout the United States, roadside markers, monuments, forts, ships, and
museums distort history. My book Lies Across America critiqued one hundred
such sites. This marker, which I critiqued in the first edition of Lies My
Teacher Told Me, inspired that book. Like many Civil War monuments and
roadside markers across the South, it misrepresented Southerners as united in
support of the Confederacy. In reality, in 1863, support from black residents in
southwest Mississippi—and from some whites as well—enabled Grant to