Lies My Teacher Told Me Written by James Loewen

James Loewen the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong debunks all the so-called truths of America's current grade school textbooks. From Christopher Columbus "discovering America" to our current Thanksgiving rituals, Loewen reveals to us that many of the facts that we were taught as children about our Nation's birth are absolutely wrong. It is these false truths that mold American youth into ethnocentric beings without teaching them the ability to make moral decisions.

Loewen first addresses the lack of enthusiasm found in our grade school history classrooms. This comes as a bit of a surprise given American's interest in history outside of school. Americans love history. They read historical books. They visit museums. They watch the history channel. They pay to see movies about America's past leaders. But when it comes to sitting in a classroom listening to a history professor, most students are bored to death. Why? Textbook history is boring. There's no climax, no melodrama. Students are drowned with fact after fact and easily lose interest within the first few pages. They are not taught that understanding the past is key to helping us understand the world around us today.

The most startling fact about grade school history lessons is that they're wrong. Traditional U.S. History books depict Pilgrims as pious, good-natured beings that were humble and generous with the first Native-American Indians that they encountered. The Pilgrims were our Nation's ancestors who were supposed to lay the foundation for our democratic traditions. Students are taught that they worked together with the Indians dealing in fair trade and learning from each other's culture and traditions. But these facts are only telling one side of the story.

Pilgrim and Indian relations did try to start out in a positive manner. But American history books conveniently leave out details about Pilgrims stealing corn from the Indians, ran-sacking old villages, digging up Indian graves to rob whatever they could, or in some instances, even engaging in cannibalism. There are several accounts that describe the grievous behavior of the pilgrims towards the Indians. In a personal journal one colonist wrote "We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again."

One of the biggest examples of misguided colonist and Indian relations is the myth about how the Indians taught the Virginia colonist how to grow corn better using fish as fertilizer. This is a huge part of our Thanksgiving tradition that is celebrated every year. What traditional textbooks won't tell you is that those Indians were actually held hostage and forced to teach the Pilgrims how to farm. But there is no indication in traditional textbooks about colonist using slave labor and certainly no correlation between slave labor