Summary Of Lies My Teacher Told Me

In the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” published in 1995 on The New Press by James W. Loewen. Loewen, whom is a professor of sociology that focus on American history goes into deep detail about the faults of High School History textbooks and why they are dreadful. The Excerpt from Inquiry to Academic Writing by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky was published by Bedford/ St. Martin's in 2008, and uses a part of Loewen’s book in there text. There is multiple mistakes that Loewen expands on: like how we aren’t taught everything we need to know, aren’t taught all the fully correct information of the past, and how America has a tone of ethnocentrism in its own history textbooks. According to Loewen

One of the major facts that Loewen points out is when the Pilgrims came to America. People know the story of Christopher Columbus the Mayflower ship, but we don’t actually know why the ship sailed its way to America. Leowen suggest that he feels it was on purpose, and some historian’s belief it was an accident (P.394). Loewen states that “But textbook authors clearly want to package the Pilgrims as a pious and moral band who laid the antecedents of our democratic traditions.” (P.395) The Pilgrims were known as the good people seeking religious freedom, but on that Mayflower ship, only 35 of the 102 people aboard were Pilgrim’s. The rest of the folk’s aboard were just ordinary people seeking fortunes in the new Virginia colony, according to Loewen (P.393). Pilgrims are made out to be great people but very few know exactly happened when they settled in America and what happened between them and the Indians. In Loewen writing he says when they became hungry, Pilgrims began to dig up Indian corpses to eat and worked as servants for Indians at times (P.396). The ships also brought over a plague killing entire villages (p.399), but textbooks leave this out to make it seem like they were these founders for the land of the