Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself.
--Howard Zinn

A new edition of the national bestseller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times.

For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be objective.

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls an extremely convincing plea for truth in education. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should--and could--be taught to American students.

Named one of the Best Art Books of the Year by Hyperallergic

Since its first publication in the 1990s, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important and successful--and beloved--history books of our time. As the late Howard Zinn said, Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. Having sold well over 2 million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and numerous other commendations and prizes and was even heralded on the front page of the New York Times long after its first publication.

Now, the brilliant and award-winning artist Nate Powell--the first cartoonist ever to win a National Book Award--has adapted Loewen's classic work into a graphic edition that perfectly captures both Loewen's text and the irreverent spirit of his work. Eye-popping illustrations bring to life the true history chronicled in Lies My Teacher Told Me, and ample text boxes and callouts ensure nothing is lost in translation. The book is perfect for those making their first foray past the shroud of history textbooks, and it will also be beloved by those who had their worldviews changed by the original.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. Now Rebecca Stefoff, the acclaimed nonfiction children's writer who adapted Howard Zinn's bestseller A People's History of the United States for young readers, makes Loewen's beloved work available to younger students.

Essential reading in our age of fake news and slippery, sloppy history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition cuts through the mindless optimism and outright lies found in most textbooks that are often not even really written by their authors. Loewen is, as historian Carol Kammen has said, the history teacher we all should have had. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and then covering characters and events as diverse as the first Thanksgiving, Helen Keller, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen's lively, provocative telling of American history is a counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past (The Nation).

This streamlined young readers' edition is rich in vivid details and quotations from primary sources that poke holes in the textbook versions of history and help students develop a deeper understanding of our world. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition brings this classic text to a new generation of readers (and their parents and teachers) who will welcome and value its honesty, its humor, and its integrity.

The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author

In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of sundown towns--almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome--that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.

Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.

In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face second-generation sundown town issues, such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.

A new edition of the national bestseller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times in the summer of 2006.

For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be objective.

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls an extremely convincing plea for truth in education. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should--and could--be taught to American students.

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus disproves the myths about Columbus still enshrined in American textbooks with quotations from primary source material that sets the record straight. The poster and accompanying 48-;page paperback book sum up the mistellings--and reveal the real story--in a graphically appealing and accessible format that shows the degree to which textbooks have lied by knowingly substituting crowd-pleasing myths for grim and gruesome historical evidence.

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called jim-dandy pop history, by the bestselling, American Book Award-winning author

The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history.
--Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans

From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated--and more timely than ever--version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.

In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:

- a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising

- a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia

- the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery

Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author

In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of sundown towns--almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome--that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.

Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.

In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face second-generation sundown town issues, such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.

Not a few professors teach solely because they have to, to hold a position that lets them do what they really want to do, which is 'their work'--their research, their writing. . . . Those professors miss the joys of teaching. --from the introduction to How to Teach College

Widely known as the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen, who passed away in 2021, was a leading sociologist of race relations and a prizewinning college educator. With a teaching career spanning over half a century at Tougaloo College, Harvard University, University of Vermont, and Catholic University, Loewen taught the way he wrote: with creativity, humor, and a high expectation that students can handle the truth.

How to Teach College is an invaluable resource for professors teaching in increasingly fraught American classrooms. With a special emphasis on teaching students from diverse backgrounds and potentially controversial subjects, this posthumously published book comes to us in Loewen's vibrant, original, and inimitable voice. In it, he offers advice from the epic (how to convey a love of one's topic and motivate students to become lifelong learners) to the technical (how to design a syllabus, manage the classroom, testing and grading)--all drawing on firsthand anecdotes from his own courses on sociology and race relations.

Edited by Loewen's son, Nicholas Loewen, a longtime high school teacher, and sociology professor Michael Dawson, How to Teach College is sure to inspire generations of teachers to come.

Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country.-- Howard Zinn

James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled Truth that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery.

Book Features:

• An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education.
• Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
• Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography.
• Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened.
• Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in today's schools.

A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called jim-dandy pop history, by the bestselling, American Book Award-winning author

The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history.
--Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans

From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated--and more timely than ever--version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.

In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:

- a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising

- a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia

- the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery

Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.

Up a Creek, With a Paddle is an intimate and often humorous memoir by the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen, who holds the distinction of being the best-selling living sociologist today. Rivers are good metaphors for life, and paddling for living. In this little book, Loewen skillfully makes these connections without sermonizing, resulting in nuggets of wisdom about how to live, how to act meaningfully, and perhaps how to die. Loewen also returns to his life's work and gently addresses the origins of racism and inequality, the theory of history, and the ties between the two. But mostly, as in his life, he finds rueful humor in every canoeing debacle--and he has had many!

These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's Declaration of the Immediate Causes. . . says, Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world.

Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

Originally published in 1974, Mississippi, Conflict and Change was a textbook that explored Mississippi's history from its earliest days to modern times, emphasizing social dynamics and key contemporary events, especially the civil rights movement and the pursuit of equality. The book was innovative for its era, offering a nuanced and truthful depiction of Mississippi's past, particularly regarding slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights era. At the time, the textbook was deemed radical by some because of its factual recounting of the state's history and inclusion of such historically overlooked groups as African Americans, Native Americans, and women. The book challenged the conventional approach to teaching history in Mississippi and was not approved by the state's textbook review committee. Its adoption in the public education system was denied until a well-publicized and successful lawsuit was brought against the state by the authors and publisher.

Mississippi, Conflict and Change has been out of print for many years and only available as a collector's item until now. This new edition of Mississippi, Conflict and Change includes an introduction telling the history of the book's publication along with updates throughout the text, made by the acclaimed author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen. Picking up the reins after Loewen's death in 2021, Byron D'Andra Orey provides new text on contemporary politics, culture, and the economy, bringing the history of the state up to date. Intended for students as well as general readers, Mississippi, Conflict and Change: A New Edition revives an integral text in Mississippi history.

Originally published in 1974, Mississippi, Conflict and Change was a textbook that explored Mississippi's history from its earliest days to modern times, emphasizing social dynamics and key contemporary events, especially the civil rights movement and the pursuit of equality. The book was innovative for its era, offering a nuanced and truthful depiction of Mississippi's past, particularly regarding slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights era. At the time, the textbook was deemed radical by some because of its factual recounting of the state's history and inclusion of such historically overlooked groups as African Americans, Native Americans, and women. The book challenged the conventional approach to teaching history in Mississippi and was not approved by the state's textbook review committee. Its adoption in the public education system was denied until a well-publicized and successful lawsuit was brought against the state by the authors and publisher.

Mississippi, Conflict and Change has been out of print for many years and only available as a collector's item until now. This new edition of Mississippi, Conflict and Change includes an introduction telling the history of the book's publication along with updates throughout the text, made by the acclaimed author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen. Picking up the reins after Loewen's death in 2021, Byron D'Andra Orey provides new text on contemporary politics, culture, and the economy, bringing the history of the state up to date. Intended for students as well as general readers, Mississippi, Conflict and Change: A New Edition revives an integral text in Mississippi history.

These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's Declaration of the Immediate Causes. . . says, Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world.

Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.