James Loewen’s essay "Lies my Teachers Told Me…""It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are notso." ­­ Felix Okoye"Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." ­­James Loewen"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible thananything anyone has ever said about it." ­­ James Baldwin"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people." ­­ General PetroG.Grigorenko, samizdat letter to history journal, c. 1975, U.S.S.R.High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history alwayscomes in last. They consider it "the most irrelevant" of 21 school subjects, not applicableto life today. "Borr­r­ring" is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it,even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, orEnglish. Even when they are forced to take history, they repress it, so every year or twoanother study decries what our 17­year­olds don’t know.African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a specialdislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse thanwhite students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in Englishand most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is notmore difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history soalienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don’tknow they’re alienated, only that they "don’t like social studies" or "aren’t any good athistory." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have lots oftime, light family responsibilities, some resources, and a flexible principal, someteachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing theirAmerican history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less.At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, theywithdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they settle for just stayingahead of their students in the books, teaching what will be on the test, and goingthrough the motions.College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had morerather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. Historyprofessors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague ofmine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his jobas disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does thishappen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non­Euclidean geometry israrely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry wasmistaught. English literature courses don’t presume that "Romeo and Juliet" wasmisunderstood in high school. Indeed, a later chapter will show that history is the onlyfield in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More thanany other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous orawful or both, history reveals how we got to this point. Understanding our past is centralto our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know ourhistory, and according to C. Wright Mills, we know we do. Outside of school, Americansdo show great interest in history. Historical novels often become bestsellers, whether byGore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho! Utah! Nebraska! Oregon!Missouri! and on! and on!). The National Museum of American History is one of thethree big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The Civil War series attracted newaudiences to public television. Movies tied to history have fascinated us from Birth of aNation through Gone With the Wind to Dances With Wolves and JFK.Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. Thesestories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventhgraders. These same stories show what America has been about and have directrelevance to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and wantto know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.What has gone wrong?We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate historyteaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The storiesthey tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not beenalready. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that mightreflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve onlymelodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out wonderful in the end."Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges," in the words of oneof them. Most authors don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that ifheard aloud might be described as "mumbling lecturer." No wonder students loseinterest.Textbooks almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might ask studentsto learn about gender roles in the present, to prompt thinking about what women did anddid not achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women’s movement. Theymight ask students to do family budgets for a janitor and a stock broker, to promptthinking about labor unions and social class in the past or present. They might, but theydon’t. The present is not a source of information for them. No wonder students findhistory "irrelevant" to their present lives.Conversely, textbooks make no real use of the past to illuminate the present. Thepresent seems not to be problematic to them. They portray history as a simple­mindedmorality play. "Be a good citizen" is the message they extract from the past for thepresent. "You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what theUnited States has done." While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it does becomesomething of a burden for students of color, children of working class parents, girls whonotice an absence of women who made history, or any group that has not already beenoutstandingly successful. The optimistic textbook approach denies any understanding offailure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are alienated. Even formale children of affluent white families, bland optimism gets pretty boring after eighthundred pages.These textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to the rest of our schooling.Why are they so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Their contents are muddled bythe conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a lookin your history book, and you’ll see why we should be proud," goes an anthem oftensung by high school glee clubs, but we need not even take a look inside. The differencebegins with their titles: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Riseof the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in highschool or college. Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, notRise of the Molecule. Even literature collections are likely to be titled Readings inAmerican Literature. Not most history books. And you can tell these books from theircovers, graced with American flags, eagles, and the Statue of Liberty.Inside their glossy covers, American history books are full of information ­ overly full.These books are huge. My collection of a dozen of the most popular averages four anda half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. No publisher wants to be shut out froman adoption because their book left out a detail of concern to an area or a group.Authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every president, even Chester A.Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter.Land of Promise, to take one example, enumerates 444 "Main Ideas" at the ends of itschapters. In addition, it lists literally thousands of "Skill Activities," "Key Terms,""Matching" items, "Fill in the Blanks," "Thinking Critically" questions, and "ReviewIdentifications" as well as still more "Main Ideas" at the ends of each section within itschapters. At year’s end, no student can remember 444 main ideas, not to mention 624key terms and countless other "factoids," so students and teachers fall back on onemain idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget them toclear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder high school graduates are notoriousfor forgetting in which century the Civil War was fought!None of the facts is memorable, because they are presented as one damn thing afteranother. While they include most of the trees and all too many twigs, authors forget togive readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooksstifle meaning as they suppress causation. Therefore students exit them withoutdeveloping the ability to think coherently about social life.Even though the books are fat with detail, even though the courses are so busy theyrarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out what we need to knowabout the American past. Often the factoids are flatly wrong or unknowable. In sum,startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. This book is abouthow we are mistaught.Errors in history textbooks do not often get corrected, partly because the historyprofession does not bother to review them. Occasionally outsiders do: FrancesFitzGerald’s 1979 study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but she made no impact onthe industry. In a sarcastic passage her book pointed out how textbooks ignored ordistorted the Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States. "Textpublishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history," she predicted, but she waswrong ­ the books have not changed.History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources ­the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaperarticles, diaries, and letters from the time. Based on these primary materials, historianswrite secondary works ­ books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness onMartha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of theseworks every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians working individuallyor in teams then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works ­ textbookscovering all phases of United States history.In practice, however, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones ofeach other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them half adozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is not written by the authors whosenames grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher’s offices.When historians do write them, they face snickers from their colleagues and deans ­tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: "Why are you writing pedagogy instead ofdoing scholarship?"The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks do list up­to­the­minute secondary sources in bibliographies at the ends of chapters, but the contentsof the chapters remain totally traditional ­ unaffected by the new research.What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? Theeditors’ voice in literature textbooks may be no more interesting than in history, but atleast that voice stills when the textbook presents original materials of literature. Theuniversal processed voice of history textbook authors insulates students from the rawmaterials of history. Rarely do authors quote the speeches, songs, diaries, and lettersthat make the past come alive. Students do not need to be protected from this material.They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan’s "Cross ofGold" speech as read two paragraphs about it, which is what American Adventuressubstitutes. No wonder students find the textbooks dull.Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furiousdebate informed by evidence and reason, not just answers to be learned. Textbooksencourage students to believe that history is learning facts. "We have not avoidedcontroversial issues" announces one set of textbook authors; "instead, we have tried tooffer reasoned judgments" on them ­ thus removing the controversy! No wonder theirtext turns students off! Because textbooks employ this god­like voice, it never occurs tomost students to question them. "In retrospect I ask myself, why didn’t I think to ask forexample who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, andhow did it change when Columbus arrived," wrote a student of mine. "However, backthen everything was presented as if it were the full picture," she continued, "so I neverthought to doubt that it was." Tests supplied by the textbook publishers then ticklestudents’ throats with multiple choice items to get them to regurgitate the factoids they"learned." No wonder students don’t learn to think critically.As a result of all this, high school graduates are hamstrung in their efforts to apply logicand information to controversial issues in our society. (Iknow because I encounter themthe next year as college freshmen.) We’ve got to do better. Five sixths of all Americansnever take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens "learn"there forms most of what they know of our past.America’s history merits remembering and understanding. This book includes tenchapters of amazing stories ­ some wonderful, some ghastly ­ in American history.Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details butevents and processes that had and have important consequences. Yet most textbooksleave out or distort them. I know because for several years I have been lugging aroundtwelve textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying whatthey say and don’t say, and trying to figure out why. I chose the twelve to represent therange of books available for American history courses. Two, Discovering AmericanHistory and The American Adventure, are "inquiry" textbooks, composed of maps,illustrations, and extracts from primary sources like diaries and laws, linked by narrativepassages. These books are supposed to invite students to "do" history themselves. TheAmerican Way, Land of Promise, The United States ­­ A History of the Republic,American History, The American Tradition, are traditional high school narrative historytextbooks. Three textbooks, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and Challenge ofFreedom, are intended for junior high students but are often used by "slow" senior highclasses. Triumph of the American Nation and The American Pageant are also used oncollege campuses. These twelve have been my window into the world of what highschool students carry home, read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent manyhours observing high school history classrooms in Mississippi, Vermont, and theWashington metropolitan area.The eleventh chapter analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption to explainwhat causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I oncewrote a history textbook. Written with co­authors, Mississippi: Conflict and Change wasthe first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although Conflict and Change wonthe Lillian Smith Award for "best nonfiction about the South" in 1975, Mississippi rejectedit for public school use, so the authors and three school systems sued the textbookboard. In April, 1980, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a sweeping victorybased on the first and fourteenth amendments. The experience taught me first­handmore than most authors or publishers ever want to know about the textbook adoptionprocess. I have also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of theadoption agencies. Chapter twelve looks at the effects of using these textbooks. Itshows that they actually make students stupid. An epilogue, "The Future Lies Ahead,"suggests distortions and omissions that went undiscussed in earlier chapters andrecommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American historymore honestly ­ sort of an inoculation program against the next lies we are otherwisesure to encounter.