Book Twelve -- Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

Lies My Teacher Told
by James W. Lowen
non-fiction
318 pages

By the time I was in high school, I could list the post-Norman Conquest rulers of England in order and probably tell you at least a little bit about each one of them. I knew that 1492 wasn't just important because that's when Columbus sailed, who Xenophon was, how Chaucer was related by marriage to the royal family, why Persepolis had been in ruins since Alexander's day and that Cleopatra was neither the first of her name nor actually Egyptian*.

American history bored the crap out of me.

Reading Lies My Teacher Told Me makes me wonder if my boredom had more to do with presentation than anything else.

Lowen looks at how high school history books present, or more accurately don't present, controversial subjects. You know, things like how Columbus was an asshole who was in it for the money (also people knew the world was round back then), how most of the Indians in the Northeast were killed off by a plague they picked up from European fishermen before the Pilgrims got there, how John Brown wasn't so crazy actually, how Reconstruction really didn't play out the way you think it did and, hey, what about class differences in the US?

What we get in our textbooks, or at least the 12 Lowen read through, is feel-good history. It's designed to make white kids feel good about being Americans. There is no controversy and things just happen without the cause being examined. And that, right there, boggles my mind. If we don't know why things happened, how can we recognize when they're happening again; how can we watch our own times and not think about cause and effect?

I wonder how different my level of interest would have been if I'd been given more than feel-good history. As it was, I got an A and then forgot all the boring dates I'd had to learn and happily went back to reading European and Ancient history. In my spare time. For fun.

Go figure.

Any way, it's a good book and a fantastic antidote to crappy high school history.


*1492 was the year of the Reconquista, when the last of the Moors were kicked out of Spain; whether this was a good thing or not depends on your point of view. Xenophon was a Greek historian who, in 400BCE, helped lead a group of mercenaries from Persia back to Greece. He wrote about it in a book called Anabasis, or The Persian Expedition. Geoffry Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was married to Phillipa Roet, whose sister Katherine was the mistress and later third wife of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and uncle to Richard II. Persepolis was burned by Alexander's troops and by all accounts, Alexander wasn't at all happy about it. The Cleopatra we've all heard of was actually Cleopatra VII, the name was, like the name Berenice, a very common name back in the day. She wasn't Egyptian; the royal family had been Greek since Egpyt was conquered by Alexander.