Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong by James W. Loewen had a title I could not resist.

Started: 7/23/2020

Completed: 8/2/2020

Recommendation: Recommended

Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This is a sort of expose of the American history textbook, but also a broader swipe at the way that Social Studies are taught.  Many of the details, from the treatment of slaves to the behavior of Christopher Columbus are well known to me now that I am learning from historians and not text books.  It is shocking, however, to realize how many things that simply are myths or outright lies permeate the historical text book.  This book is not unlike the critical look that Feynman took of science text books.  He too found distortions, misrepresentations, and confusing depictions in the texts.

It seems likely that a part of the problem, in my opinion, is that actual members of the profession do not review the texts in general.  I can see where this could lead to nitpicking or support for a particular theory that does not have sufficient proof to be guiding or sufficient disproof to be dismissed.  It should, however, remove outright lies.

One of the things that my high school history professor did was to hold trials in the classroom that mimicked real trials.  In one of these, I was assigned Alfred Jodl who was a member of the German high command during WWII.  I remember researching the evidence from the Nuremburg trials (the high school had volume after volume of this material covering probably 20 or 30 feet of shelving) and discovering that Jodl did not sign his own orders--they were stamped by his secretary.  My defense team concocted the outrageous defense that Jodl was a drooling idiot who was only a figure head to the secretary who masterminded things and stamped all the orders.  Jodl got off in our classroom trial, but the most interesting part was reading the orders.  They were shocking and horrible tangible proof that the assault on the Jewish population was methodical.  I still feel the bile rise in my throat when I think about it.  How many people who read those types of orders, see the train manifests, read the concentration camp logs, and see the documentation of those liberated from the camps could still deny the holocaust?

I think that the author brings valuable information to the fore and pointing us all towards source documentation is critically important with the necessary support of secondary sources to try and sift the wheat from the chaff.  Does it matter that Lincoln said he would never free the slaves, then he did so?  If it matters, why?  Was Lincoln just a waffler blown about by political winds, was he someone who matured in his approach, was he an opportunist who was solely focused on winning the war, or was he some of all these things?  Can a human being have his entire life summarized be a trite phrase?