• Lies My Teacher Told Me

  • Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
  • By: James W. Loewen
  • Narrated by: Brian Keeler
  • Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (2,957 ratings)

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Lies My Teacher Told Me

By: James W. Loewen
Narrated by: Brian Keeler
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Publisher's summary

This national best seller is an entertaining, informative, and sometimes shocking expose of the way history is taught to American students. Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.

James W. Loewen, a sociology professor and distinguished critic of history education, puts 12 popular textbooks under the microscope, and what he discovers will surprise you. In his opinion, every one of these texts fails to make its subject interesting or memorable. Worse still is the proliferation of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, and misinformation filling the pages.

From the truth about Christopher Columbus to the harsh reality of the Vietnam War, Loewen picks apart the lies we've been told. This is a book that will forever change your view of the past.

©1995 James W. Loewen (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Lies My Teacher Told Me goes beyond recounting fallacies of history and correcting American image: it surveys social issues misreported, ideas misrepresented, and encourages students of history to think about not only the facts, but the reporting which embellishes and colors their presentation. An invaluable guide for the reader." (Midwest Book Review)
"An extremely convincing plea for truth in education." (San Francisco Chronicle)

What listeners say about Lies My Teacher Told Me

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Of course he has an agenda. He wrote a book!

I agree with the criticism that the author has an agenda, but I disagree that it is so clearly biased. While his examples often include commentary and opinion, the reader should be able to filter through that to the real point: there is a lot of missing information or outright lies told in high school history books used today.

I especially like the reviewer here who expresses the sentiment that Americans be proud of their history. That reviewer misses the main point which is that you don't only tell the positives without any of the negatives because you deprive the student from understanding that history, both the people and the events in it, are not one dimension things which can be glossed over.

I challenge any reader/listeners of this book to think about whether the way Americans are taught history is accurate for all students. If you are native American, African, or any other racial group other than white, are the stories accurate or is American history just supposed to make white Americans feel good about how great they are?

I am white and no apologist. History is history and none of us are responsible for what others did, especially in the past. The point is that history should help us understand why our world is the way it is today. If it's just a feel good fiction story, what is the point?

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281 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

I'm a stupid white girl...

...at least that's what my American History professor told me during my first year of college. As it turns out, he might have been right. By the third chapter of this book I had to pause it to go look up information on the author just to make sure it wasn't my history professor. It's not. Just some old white guy. But I swear this is the same information that I so vehemently rejected in college. Perhaps (and I hate to say this) I was more accepting of the information because it was coming from a white man and not from a black man who I found condesending and insulting. Or maybe it's because I have age and experience on my side this time.

The argument I used with my professor was that, although I'm white, I came from the lowest of low classes and escaped a religious cult in order to get an education. I was offended that he was telling me that I, and all other white people, are the reason that he struggled to make something of himself.

This book brought both of these issues into clear focus for me. Race and social class. It would seem that my professor and I were playing roles we had been given by society and by our collective history.

I thought this book was going to be more about getting the facts straight, but it is, instead, about why we are taught history that emphisizes the positives and complettely ignores any negatives, and how/why we need to change how history is taught in high school. Like some of the other reviewers, I found the author to be a bit boring and sometimes a little too angry. I understand his passion, but it came off as preachy.

On the positive side, even when the book was boring, it still kept my interest. I knew a lot of the awful things about slavery, genocide and that Christopher Columbus was an a**hole, but was truly amazed at what he said about Helen Keller. I like her even more now. Yes, yes. So she identified herself as a communist. But she had the guts to stand up and shout (sign?) about what she knew was wrong, and that's more than most hearing and sighted people are willing to do.

This book won't be for everyone. It's academic rather than entertaining. But if you have the patience to get through it, you might just be a better person for it. Even if you don't like what the author is saying, perhaps you can still take away from this book the message that I found to be the most important. Think for yourself, ask questions and don't follow along blindly when you can be an active participant.

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109 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

A ghastly bore full of unintended irony

High school history text books walk a fine line, and they have to in order to be acceptable in such a diverse nation as ours. But if you were to put in everything Dr. Loewen wants, the book would be too heavy to carry. I agree that high school american history is boring. I certainly thought so at the time. Unfortunately, Loewen ends up often doing the exact same thing he accuses the textbooks of doing: inserting an agenda. And what is wrong with trying to make Americans feel good about their nation? As students mature, they will make up their own minds about a whole range of subjects, including history. By relying on dry facts, history books attempt to sidestep sensitive political issues.

Loewen seems to want history written as an editorial, and not let the reader decide for themselves. How many accept Loewen's multicultural thesis as fact? This wholesale acceptance of one point of view as fact is precisely the issue Mr. Loewen is trying to thwart. I hope this irony is not lost on Mr. Loewen.

Dr. Loewen is certainly entitled to his point of view, but I am concerned by the attempt to hide an agenda of political indoctrination under the cloak of "objective" scholarship. The book contains selective facts that support a political agenda. Is multiculturalism about minority viewpoints or political correctness? According to this book, liberal ideas such as multiculturalism are not to be questioned - they are to be taught to students as gospel. This is disturbing stuff. Where, then, is the questioning? Loewen is a sociologist, not a historian. History is history. You can't lie about it.

The narration is adequate, though a bit on the excitable side sometimes.

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104 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Could you please read me 12 American History books

It started out with facts. Helen Keller was an outspoken communist. President Wilson's foreign policy affects our current international image. Columbus enslaved Indians and brought the plague that wiped them out.

But then it degenerated into reading passages from 12 history books and ranting about how Indian history was misrepresented and why everything European was evil. Right or wrong, his approach is boring.

I lasted almost through half of the audio book before I realized it was never going to get any better. Skip this for the history lesson. There are many better books on Indian history. Skip this for the humor, there isn't any. Skip this for a rehash of all of the bad history you learned in high school. It was bad enough the first time.

On second thought, just skip this altogether.

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84 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American

This is only the second book that I have made an effort to review. I am doing so because I wish to spare some poor soul 13 hours of misery.

It should be titled “A few inaccuracies and omissions in high school american history textbooks and my opinions”. It started out with a few inaccuracies that are well established and then degenerated to finding fault with everything and everyone in America, except for the poor lower income group, which has no hope. An accurate description would be that Mr. Loewen in a hammer and everything is a nail.

Mr. Loewen must feel terrible having no hope and finding nothing right with America. He is still rehashing and expounding on his experiences as a social activist in the 60s. Things are different!

I grew up in the lower class and used all of the virtues that Mr. Loewen criticizes to do well. Mr. Loewen is a sociologist and can always see the dark side of the few statistics that he has. Unless you like being criticized and depressed for the last 6-7 hours, don’t bother with this one.

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75 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Historical Fiction Stranger Than Truth

Who was the first black major league baseball player? Which iconic child hero grew up to be a radical socialist communist feminist? Which president lionized for his prescient foreign policy and progressive domestic initiatives ordered some half dozen foreign invasions, even sending troops into Soviet Russia, and re-institutionalized racism? Which great American hero, one of only two honored by name with a national holiday, launched genocide and slavery in the western hemisphere? Was Lincoln actually racist?

Why don't we know these things? Because, according to author James Loewen, a professor of sociology, our high school history textbooks omit, distort, or outright misstate some facts of our history, striving to tell a nationalistic story based on pride, patriotism, rationalization, and self-congratulation rather than the truth of the matter. Our history was, as the saying goes, written by the winners.

But, warns Loewen, if you elevate that cliche from explanation to excuse, you risk falling into another cliche: those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Twenty years after Loewen wrote his cautionary tale, recent history demonstrate his point -- the fictional rationale for invading Iraq, ongoing debates that sometimes devolve into turmoil over social justice, racial inequality, and environmental disaster, and (on the more specific issue of how these things are taught), the introduction of controversial textbooks in some states that exacerbate the distortions Loewen wrote about two decades earlier to further a particular political agenda.

How you react to this book, to its premise, to its highly detailed decimation of history texts, will depend on how willing you are to re-examine what you were taught in high school, how you feel about the truth behind myths taught as history. It will likely also depend on whether your personal opinion tacks to starboard, because this book decidedly leans to port. Loewen has an unmistakable point of view -- I believe his case would pack more punch if he took an objective approach, even though I align with him almost 100% ideologically.

As a one-time history major back in my long-ago college days, I always prefer truth over mythology. So I ate up Oliver Stone's TV documentary and companion book, The Untold History of the United States, and I devoured this book in audio format. I already knew many of these things, but I was still capable of being surprised by other revelations. I would heartily recommend this to others willing to re-examine the truth behind some of our beliefs. If you're not comfortable with that, I suspect you don't need me to tell you stay away, you'll get that from the title and description.

My only criticism is that the last three chapters are no longer about the distortions in our history texts, but about how these texts are created and adopted, how they affects people's perceptions, and what can be done to rectify the situation. The context of how history is taught in high school is perfect for unmasking the truth of our history, but for me personally, the subject of the textbooks themselves is less interesting. So this ultimately cost the book one star in the story category (I would really like to rate it 4 1/2 stars, so I go with 4 for story and 5 overall to get a 4 1/2 average -- the narration gets only a 4 because it sometimes borders on strident).

The answers to the questions in the opening paragraph: a) not Jackie Robinson, b) Helen Keller, c) Woodrow Wilson, d) Columbus, and e) other than being against slavery, yes, in his early days, as was almost everyone in his era, but he evolved rapidly once he became president.

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53 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Scholorly but Boring

The important thing to know about this book is that it's not a history book. It's a book ABOUT history books.

I bought this book thinking it was another book I had read in the past : "That's Not in MY History Book", which is a really fun read and very informative.

"Lies..", on the other hand is a rather scholorly work but boring, repetitive, and whiny. You won't learn too many new anecdotal facts, but rather just a handful that are meticulously proven then worked to death. For example, expect to learn that Hellen Keller became a card-carrying communist (which is interesting), then prepare to listen to the author whine that it's not in the history books for about 20 pages.

If you want to listen to a history book that I think would get the "Lies.." stamp of approval yet not be boring, I would suggest "Everything You Need to Know about American History but Never Learned". There's a 6 hour version and a 20 hr version. That books doesn't gloss over slavery, indians, or any of the other hot buttons, yet at the same time has a positive vibe. Listen to this books a few times, as I did, and you'll not only be an expert on American History, but an expert on Indian History, Black history and the slavery issue. Then you can quiz your friends and laugh at them. Ha!

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46 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

The author has an agenda.

While there are many interesting and previously unknown ideas in this book, there is quite abit of editorializing by the author. Rather than reporting what most history books have omitted, intentionally or otherwise, the author has chosen, on too many occasions, to put his own interpretation on events. He also slants those opinions in ways that will make you wonder about his overall motives.

I was OK with most of the first half of the book but he lost me when he started talking about events that have occured in my lifetime and in which I played a part.

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44 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Reviewer Missed His Own Point

The first reviewer ("James") concluded that "History is history- you can't lie about it."; however, the very point of the book is that you can lie about history and, very often, those who lie are the very people who author the textbooks used in many High School history classes.

The real question poised by this book is more blunt: should we teach our children the full truth about the history of our country (good, bad, and indifferent) or do we try to instill "unquestioning patriotism" on the masses?

The book does become more "preachy" towards the second half, and the author certainly has an agenda of his own, but the questions raised are still salient, appropiate, and very interesting.

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38 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Worthwhile, but not a classic

It's an easy listen but a tremendous amount is missing without the illustrations and notes of the print copy, which my daughter had as required reading in her seconary AP American History class -- which caused me to listen in the first place.

This is NOT a history book. It's a sociology book about secondary history education. Unfortunately while the author makes an impassioned plea for the problem he fails to provide any comprehensive solution. More textbooks with less scope and more depth won't do it, yet that, along with a change in the approach of teachers and school boards (and no methodology for achieving that) are about all that's really proposed.

Likewise, it's easy to say that we should not publish inaccurate or misleading data and then feed it to our students under the guise of unalterable facts. I agree strongly with the fact that we should not publish information that is untrue -- but its nowhere near as clear how far we should go to _draw_attention_ to the humanity and foibles of our "heros" without destroying the reason for mentioning the hero at all.

Stong "liberal" agenda to the book, but the fundamental message that students should be taught to THINK, and that avoiding controversy is destructive to that end, is valid.

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37 people found this helpful