Lies My Teacher Told Me Lesson Plan

James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me is a tour-de-force education in American history—but even more than that, it is a call for more engaging and less biased ways of teaching that history. Loewen, a sociologist by training, here applies his expertise to 12 textbooks widely used around the nation, and finds that they are rife with inaccuracies, omissions, skewed perspectives, falsifications, and outright myth. The origins of these deficits varies, but their consequences are serious: Loewen alleges that the content of American history textbooks leaves American students unable to understand or think critically about their past, even though this is absolutely crucial for the exercise...