I had 17 new students in my new second semester seminar and I didn't want to do all the talking the first day of class so I asked them, "OK, what is Reconstruction? What comes to your mind from that period?"Īnd what happened to me was an aha experience, although you might better consider it an oh-no experience: 16 out of my 17 students said, "Well, Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states. My first full-time teaching job was at a black college, Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.Ĭan you take me back to the original inspiration for the book? What that does, I hope, is signal to every reader of the book: Yes, there are such things as facts here. There's all kinds of grass and gaps that you see in the Trump photo. And you just look at those two photos and they're completely different. He tells NPR, "I started out the new edition with the famous two photographs of the inaugural crowds of this guy named President Obama, his first inauguration, and this guy named President Trump, his first and maybe only inauguration. In a new edition out this summer, James Loewen - now professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont - is championing the cause of critical thinking in the age of fake news. The book has racked up many awards and sold around 2 million copies since it was first published in 1995. In doing so, Lies My Teacher Told Me overturned one assumption embedded in the history classes I'd been sitting through all my life: that the United States is constantly ascending from greatness to greatness. It introduced me to concepts that still help me make sense of the world, like the "racial nadir" - the downturn in American race relations, starting after Reconstruction, that saw the rise of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, explained how history textbooks got the story of America wrong, usually by soft-pedaling, oversimplifying and burying the thorny drama and uncertainties of the past under a blanket of dull, voice-of-God narration. Slim in contrast to our hulking required textbook, it was a funny, compelling, even shocking read. When I was a high school junior in New Orleans taking AP American history, my teacher assigned us a paperback book.
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