As evidenced in my own story, a high school student could read his books and understand the arguments he made. One is that Loewen was a gifted writer whose engaging and often humorous style really made the words jump off the page. Two important insights are worth further mentioning here. His ten questions for historic sites remains an excellent foundation for critically analyzing the interpretive focus of a given site: I wrote about one particularly influential story Loewen discussed in the book about Louisiana’s “Uncle Jack” statue here a few years ago. history in the interest of promoting consensus history. Loewen’s critical interrogation of public monuments, historical markers, and historic sites demonstrated the ways public history sites, just like history classrooms, often left out important stories from U.S. But as I began pursuing a career in public history, Loewen’s Lies Across America probably played an even bigger role in my career development than Lies My Teacher Told Me. Of course, that career track did not work out for me (I was even turned down from a position once “because we need a basketball coach”). These were the sorts of words that inspired me to originally pursue a history teaching degree in undergrad so that I could be a part of the solution to poor teaching in the history classroom. Even whey they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it.

Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. history were often swept under the rug in the interest of promoting a consensus version of history that promoted loyalty to the nation at the expense of historical accuracy, and that trivial facts and rote memorization of dates often replaced discussions of causes, context, and consequences in the history classroom.

Loewen clearly demonstrated that difficult aspects of U.S. It was probably the first book I ever read that seriously questioned the way history was taught in the classroom. I took a serious interest in history as a middle schooler in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and read Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me while I was still in high school. Loewen passed away yesterday at the age of 79 and feel compelled to write a few lines about the influence of his tremendous scholarship on my own work as a public historian. I was very saddened to hear that sociologist and historian James W.

James loewen books