2016, 07/21 – Lies my Teacher Told Me with James W. Loewen


Originally aired April 2016.

James LoewenJames W. Loewen is a regular contributor to the History Channel’s History magazine and is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont. Professor Loewen shows after surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.

James Loewen’s gripping retelling of American history as it should, and could, be taught, Lies My Teacher Told Me, has sold more than 1,500,000 copies and continues to inspire K-16 teachers to get students to challenge, rather than memorize, their textbooks.

Jim Loewen taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont. Previously he taught at predominantly black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He now lives in Washington, D.C., continuing his research on how Americans remember their past. Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong came out in 1999. The Gustavus Myers Foundation named his book, Sundown Towns, a “Distinguished Book of 2005.” In 2010, Teachers College Press brought out Teaching What Really Happened, intended to give K-12 teachers (and prospective teachers) solutions to the problems pointed out in Loewen’s earlier works.

He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases. His awards include the First Annual Spivack Award of the American Sociological Association for “sociological research applied to the field of intergroup relations,” the American Book Award (for Lies My Teacher Told Me), and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. He is also Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Visiting Professor of Sociology at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and Visiting Professor of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. In 2012 the American Sociological Association gave Loewen its Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, for “scholarship in service to social justice.” He is the first white person ever to win this award. Also in 2012, the National Council for the Social Studies gave Loewen its “Spirit of America” Award, previously won by, inter alia, Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, and Mr. Rogers.

 

To learn more about James W. Loewen, go to http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/index.php

To get your copy of Lies my Teacher Told Me, please click here.

 

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