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 slave 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.

This national best-seller and American Book Award winner is an entertaining, informative, and sometimes shocking expose of the way history is taught to American students. James W. Loewen, a distinguished critic of history education, puts 12 popular textbooks under the microscope. What he finds is a proliferation of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, misinformation, and flat-out lies filling the pages.

“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 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.

Now adapted for young readers ages 12 through 18, the national bestseller that makes real American history come alive in all of its conflict, drama, and complexity 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.

An esteemed academic for over 20 years, Dr. James W. Loewen also penned the New York Times best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me. Through this enlightening lecture series, Dr. Loewen roots out many historical inaccuracies that are still taught to children today.

Professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, James W. Loewen won the National Book Award for his New York Times best-seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Sundown Towns examines thousands of all-white American towns that were- and still are, in some instances-racially exclusive by design.