In this episode, we discuss James Loewen’s bestselling book Lies My Teacher Told Me. We begin the episode by talking about our own experiences with high school history, both as students and, in Aidan’s case, as a teacher. We then get into the material of the book, outlining Loewen’s main thesis and the examples he provides of the failures of American high school history textbooks.

Show Notes

Good interview with James Loewen if you want to hear the author in his own words

Summarizing Loewen’s major critiques of American high school history textbooks:

* They misrepresent the past

* e.g. The history of Reconstruction, the history of Indian assimilation

* They make the past just a bunch of unconnected factoids rather than a causal and contingent chain of events

* Little analysis of counterfactuals; history presented basically as inevitable, without alternatives

* They evacuate the past of ideas/ideology

* They tell a boring moral story of progress while obscuring villainy

* Something like slavery is portrayed as something like a natural disaster; people only do good things, not bad things

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

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