During the past few months of writing this blog, I have been able to memorialize, in some small way, writers, journalists, historians and others who have influenced my life as a writer, historian and as an individual. Some were my inspiration as a writer, others were journalists who have had similar passions for the profession and some have been historians who made an impact on the world of both writing and teaching. One such writer I have mentioned before in the course of writing about historical perspectives, who I view as having changed, somewhat, the view of American history as it is taught in many public schools.
James W. Loewen, whose million-selling Lies My Teacher Told Me books challenged traditional ideas and knowledge on everything from Thanksgiving to the Iraq War, died August 19 at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 79.
His publisher, New Press, announced his death. A professor emeritus at University of Vermont who lived in Washington, D.C., Dr. Loewen had been diagnosed two years ago with Stage 4 bladder cancer and posted his “Notes toward an obituary” on his own personal Website.
“Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present,” was his guiding principle, he wrote. “Achieving justice in the present helps us tell the truth about the past.”
Dr. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong was published in 1995 and became a readers’ favorite, challenging the stale prose and bland presentations of classroom books and what he considered a white, Eurocentric view of the past.
He based his findings on his research while on fellowship at Smithsonian Institution, where he spent two years looking through textbooks. He gave his chapters such headlines as “The Truth About the First Thanksgiving,” “Gone With the Wind: The Invisibility of American Racism in American Textbooks” and “See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam.”
Dr. Loewen prided himself on pointing out the socialist beliefs of Helen Keller or the diversity of American Native culture. He chastised textbook authors for ignoring the history of labor unions and leaving students with the impression that the mistreatment of workers was something “that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago.”
In a 2018 interview with National Public Radio, he said that inspiration for Lies My Teacher Told Me came while he was teaching at the historically black Tougaloo College in Mississippi and asked his students for their thoughts on Reconstruction.
“And what happened to me was an ‘A-ha’ 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. But they were too soon out of slavery and so they screwed up and White folks had to take control again.’ ”
“My little heart sank.”
Dr. Loewen’s book won American Book Award and was sometimes likened to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History as an alternate text for liberals. A Publishers Weekly review called Lies My Teacher Told Me a “politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks” that was “sure to please liberals and infuriate conservatives.”
He continued the series with Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition. He revised the original work in 2018.
His other books included Teaching What Really Happened, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White and the memoir Up a Creek, With a Paddle. New Press will publish a graphic edition in 2023 of Lies My Teacher Told Me, which Dr. Loewen had been working on with artist Nate Powell, who had collaborated with the late Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia on his acclaimed “March” graphic trilogy.
James William Loewen was born February 6, 1942, in Decatur, Illinois. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a teacher and librarian. While studying sociology at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, during the height of the civil rights movement, he spent the early part of 1963 auditing courses at Mississippi State University, while also visiting Tougaloo College and Tuskegee Institute.
He enjoyed all three Southern colleges but felt a particular kinship with Tougaloo, where students actually bought and read books not assigned them in courses, a rarity at MSU, Dr. Loewen wrote on his website.
He graduated from Carleton in 1964 and received a master’s degree in 1967 and a doctorate in sociology in 1968, both from Harvard University. Dr. Loewen spent 20 years on the faculty of University of Vermont. He had been a visiting professor of sociology at Catholic University since 1997.
Before establishing himself as an author, Dr. Loewen co-wrote a textbook that helped lead to a legal battle that anticipated current debates over how race should be taught. In 1974, he and Charles Sallis published Mississippi: Conflict and Change, an intended corrective to what they saw as the racially biased information that his Tougaloo students had been assigned for a required 9th-grade course on the state’s history.
The book won Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction, presented by Southern Regional Council, but officials in Mississippi voted to reject it for classroom use, alleging that Mississippi: Conflict and Change devoted too much time to black history. Dr. Loewen and others sued. In 1980, United States District Court Judge Orma Smith ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and ordered the book placed on the “approved” list.
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