Lies My Teacher Told Me Essay Research

Lies My Teacher Told Me Essay, Research Paper

James W. Loewen is a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont. Born in Decatur, Illinois, his father was a doctor and his mother was a housewife and junior high school librarian. He is co-author of the first integrated state-history textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, and creator of The Truth About Columbus: A Subversively True Poster Book for a Dubiously Celebratory Occasion.

Loewen taught for many year at Tougaloo College, a college in Mississippi that is predominantly African-American. When he was there, he was troubled about what his students believed was Reconstruction. They thought that Reconstruction was the time period when blacks took over the government of the Southern states right after the Civil War, but they were too soon out of slavery, and so they messed up and whites had to take control again. What really happened was that the Southern states were governed by a black-white coalition led by whites. Many of the Southern states, particularly Mississippi, had good government during Reconstruction. In Mississippi, the state government during that time period started the public schools for whites as well as blacks, wrote a superb new constitution, and did many other non-segregated or discriminatory things. Loewen was shocked that the one time that they were on the center of stage in American history, they did not even know what truly happened. Loewen realized that the only reason why these bright students thought that was because it was what their high school state history books said. Thus, the faculty, students, and he wrote a new history of Mississippi called Mississippi: Conflict and Change.

After he moved to Vermont, Loewen realized that the majority of history books left out key events, twisted facts and stories around to leave out anything that might reflect badly upon national character, and even told lies. This prompted and motivated Loewen to write the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me. Also, eighty-three percent of students who graduate from high school never take another history course, which includes people who don t go to college as well as those who go to college. The main reason for that is because of the boring nature of the extremely fat textbooks. Even though the books swell with facts, events, and detail, teachers and textbooks still leave out most of what students need to know about the American past. Some of the factoids presented are wrong and even lies. After surveying twelve leading high school American history texts for eleven years, Loewen s novel provides the truth about some misconceptions in American history.

Format

Though some wonderful and some ghastly, Lies My Teacher Told Me includes ten chapters of amazing stories in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes with important consequences.

Since the book is about the truth about events that are well-known in history, it is non-fiction and there is no set setting. It begins with the early 1900s when Helen Keller was a radical socialist and Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist. It then moves back in time to the late 1400s, early 1500s, when Columbus supposedly discovered America, when in truth the Africans did. Next, it moves on to the early 1600s to when the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts and had the First Thanksgiving. Next, the book jumps to the mid 1700s to early 1800s to tell about the Native Americans and their struggle with Whites for their ancestral land. This leads to the mid and late1800s, when slavery was a key issue and people like John Brown and Abraham Lincoln were alive. The book ends in the 1900s, explaining how social class affects everyone and also about the Vietnam War.

Loewen provides the reader with an introduction to the book, explaining the reason why he wrote this book. He explains to us his thesis about how history textbooks alter what really happened and even sometimes make up inaccurate detail to make the story or even sound better. His last two chapters of the book uses all the amazing stories that he told in the preceding chapters to further support his thesis. Chapter Eleven explains how textbooks are created to explain what causes them to be so bad. Chapter Twelve explains the results of using standard American history textbooks and how they can actually make students stupid.

At the beginning of each chapter, Loewen used three or four powerful quotes to foreshadow what the chapter is about. They also help the reader to establish what mood Loewen would like us to feel and to keep in mind while reading the chapter. Also, throughout the chapter, Loewen also uses quotes and passages from people, but mainly from textbooks. These passages are used to help the author show how vague textbooks are and even to show how textbook authors twist stories around what really happened. In addition, captivating pictures and charts are also included to illustrate some images and events that happened.

Thesis

In this book, Loewen examines twelve United States History textbooks that “averaged four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length.” (p. 3) The underlying message in Lies My Teacher Told Me is that one can not trust their history books or their teachers because they [textbooks] are a security to teachers, manipulate our fee