NOTES

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

1 Student, email via AOL.com, 1996.

2 Tomi Evans, email, 10/2005.

3 Via Erik Bailey, emial, 11/2005.

4 Dudley Lewis, “Teaching the Truth,” San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle,
11/26/1995. Lewis was the first commentator to pair Howard Zinn’s People’s
History and Lies. He was far from the last. Our books are very different, partly
because our politics differ, but we are equally critical of the smug boring
textbooks that still dominate American history on the high school level.

5 Mary Mackey, “Don’t Know Much About History... ,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 2/12/1995.

6 “Joan” at independentreader.com (1995); website has since changed hands.

7 Others have done better, but they’re dead!

8 Several readers have taken me to task for including almost nothing about
women’s history. To be sure, in the Afterword I took myself to task for this
omission and explained it by noting that the job had already been done. A note
to that chapter directs readers to six different critiques of history textbooks’
treatment of women; I could not bring myself to do again what others had done
so well. I must admit, however, that I have yet to meet a single person who
read one of these critiques because of my suggestion, so perhaps I should have
addressed the topic myself.

9 When I did this on a panel with Herbert Kohl and Howard Zinn in Boston,
Zinn suggested, “Maybe you should have called your book Lies 70 Percent of
My Teachers Told Me.”