This episode continues our discussion of James Loewen’s bestselling book Lies My Teacher Told Me. We look at the reason he gives for why high school history textbooks are so bad, and we spend much of the episode talking about how high school history classes could be improved.

Show Notes

Link to the Popular Info piece cited at the top of the episode.

Great quote from the book: “But only about history and social studies do writers actually ask, ‘Can textbooks have scholarly integrity?’ Only in history is accuracy so political.” (pg. 333)

Credits

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

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Our second episode extends our conversation that we began in episode one. Having discussed history’s importance, we now turn to how to approach history. We consult another clip of Eric Foner to make the point that strong beliefs about present matters do not detract from your ability to understand the past. If anything, they enhance it. We then cover the benefits of interdisciplinarity and the drawbacks of narrow expertise.

After that, we talk about the various popular narratives of history, which we break down into the categories of old and new liberal versus old and new conservative history. We introduce an objective-subjective schema to help with understanding the differences between how these narratives operate. A discussion of Howard Zinn follows, and we conclude by giving some book and movie recommendations, which we’ve also included below.

Hope you enjoy the episode, and remember to subscribe to stay in the loop! Part one of our next episode, which will be a breakdown of James Loewen’s bestselling book Lies My Teacher Told Me, will be out on Monday, July 29th. The second part will come out on Thursday, August 1st.

Show Notes

Eric Foner interview

Keynes quote: “The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts… He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”

Matt Karp, History As End

Howard Zinn interview

Clarification: Apparently the police officer who died on January 6th was not killed with a fire extinguisher, despite initial reporting saying he was.

Recommendations

Books

* The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

* Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

* All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

* Declarations of Independence

* Death of the Liberal Class

* The New Urban Question

* The Broken Heart of America

* The Responsibility of Intellectuals

* George Orwell’s nonfiction books

Movies

* Oppenheimer

* Killers of the Flower Moon

* Zone of Interest

* Various Woodstock ‘99 documentaries

* The Post

* Milk

* Cinderella Man

* The Great Debaters

* The Big Short

* Malcolm X

* Best of Enemies

Credits

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

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The first episode of the History Onion podcast is here!

In today’s episode, we introduce ourselves and explain why we’ve decided to start this podcast. We then listen to a couple of clips from interviews with Eric Foner and Howard Zinn, two of our favorite historians, as a jumping off point for a discussion about the importance of history. The interviews are linked in the show notes below.

Our next episode, on how to approach history, will come out on Monday, July 22nd, and we plan to publish a new episode every Monday going forward. Some weeks will also include a Thursday episode as a bonus. Subscribe to keep up to date!

Show Notes

Eric Foner interview

Howard Zinn interview

Credits

Big thanks to our youngest brother Tate for making the theme music for the podcast!

And shout out to Arthur Santoro for designing the podcast cover art!

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.