Meredith's review
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
This was a book that I picked up in college, while I was in the social studies division of the education school. I knew before reading it that, with an endorsement from Howard Zinn (who wrote A People's History of the United States), it would be a very liberal, multi-cultural take on history education. My favorite chapters in the book were the historical-content-heavy ones. There was some really interesting information that I'd never heard before (not surprisingly) and great factoids for sharing with others: for instance, did you know that the original Virginia settler, starving after arriving in late fall and spending most of their initial time on the island digging holes for gold, exhumed Native American graves in order to steal grave goods and occassionally to eat the recently-deceased? Well, now you do. Loewen's main focus is on Native American history, African American history, and social class history, so the majority of the book deals with the Reconstruction period and earlier. ...more
