This is part of an ongoing mission to understand and explore the ways Hypermedia changes the way we think and learn.

According to James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, American History is the least liked and worst remembered subject in American curricula. Why?

Example 1: Pilgrims

Pilgrims, who textbooks say “started from scratch,” really started with a fully functional American Indian village previously emptied by European plagues (90). After Pilgrims settled, they then proceeded to dig graves to find whatever else they needed!

Example 2: Columbus

Desperate “to pay back dividends to those who had invested, [Columbus] had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death….The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

Example 3: “The Socialist Challenge”
Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire: all the people were trapped because the company had violated safety laws and had exit routes locked to “keep track of employees.” Zinn cites this news excerpt from The New York World about the event:

“ . . .screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying. . . .”

Example 4: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The said purpose of these bombings was to minimize the loss of life that would take place if troops were to invade Japan. But The United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1944 discovered that Japan would have surrendered before the bombings. So why did the bombings still occur? Zinn says that it was because of America’s desire to occupy Japan before Russia. He quotes Blackett as saying that the bombs were “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia. . .” And he gives evidence that suggests there were American POWs in the vicinity of Nagasaki who were knowingly sacrificed in the bombings as well as testimony that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population.” (p.414-415)

Example 5: Slavery and John Brown

Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat slavery, they minimize white complicity in it. They present it as a tragedy, rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on others. Students must be taught the causes of slavery, and in order to do this, textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system, the social structure, and racism as an idea system: the superstructure.

The textbooks from the years 1890-1970, have deemed John Brown as an “insane, deranged, gaunt, grim, terrible, and crackbrained murderer.” Textbooks have no sympathy for Brown and disregard his life before Harpers Ferry by saying “somehow he got interested in helping black slaves.” In addition, textbooks made Brown’s Pottawatomie killings seem equally unmotivated by neglecting to tell that the violence in Kansas had hitherto been perpetrated primarily by the proslavery side. Several months prior, Brown had helped 35 free men defend themselves against several hundred marauding proslavery men from Missouri, which earned him the nickname “Osawatomie John Brown.” Not one textbook mentions what Brown did at Osawatomie where he was the defender, but most tell what he did at Pottawatomie, where he was the attacker.

Textbooks also handicap Brown by not letting him speak for himself. Some include two or maybe three sentences; many do not even provide a phrase. His words, which moved a nation, can not even move students today.

Example 6: Lincoln

Textbooks venerate Lincoln mainly because he “saved the Union.” In life, Lincoln wrestled with the race question more openly than any other presidents. Most textbooks ignore Lincoln’s internal debate, his struggle to apply America’s democratic principles across the color line. Their favorite statement of Lincoln’s is his letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union…

This next part is what most textbooks leave out…

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere could be free.

Textbooks also discuss the Emancipation Proclamation as a “reluctant” act.

Why is it important to know the truth?

• There were some problems, but great (white and wealthy) Americans overcame. --That is not History.
• Truth is knowledge, which gives power to the people!
• Now: no one has agency in history except the government.
  According to textbooks, no one in all of American history did anything because they thought things through, questioned the status quo, or made wrong choices—even the enemy! People simply win because they are American, or loose because they are in the way of freedom’s progress.
  

Formatted book review HERE, plain text version HERE