Everything by the author is well researched, thought provoking, and tells us things we don't want to hear but need to.

James Loewen's book "Lies My Teacher Told Me" addresses a problem I could easily detect when I was in high school: history class is boring. Worse, it doesn't HAVE to be boring -- I've since read many fascinating history books on my own that have really expanded my knowledge and interest in the subject. In this book Loewer surveys twelve of the most commonly used high school American history books to determine what is wrong with them.

Going into this book I expected it to be a straightforward and precise debunking of a lot of exaggerated and manufactured pieces of American folklore, much like Bill Bryson did in his books on the English language. "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is rather more blunt -- Loewen's premise is that history textbooks have been dumbed down and slanted to portray an endlessly optimistic and patriotic view of America which suits the needs of the conservative white people who sit on textbook adoption boards. Loewen does a good job of showing what goes in to publishing a history text -- to assure that the book will be adopted widely, authors must take care not to badmouth southerners, any of the American presidents and forefathers, or the United States in general. Conversely, textbooks are stuck including all sorts of minor historical characters in their narratives to satisfy the local pride of as many different school districts as possible. What results is pre-chewed history which is short on controversial ideas and long on names and dates. This is why history is polled to be students' least favorite subject, according to Loewen.

I whole-heartedly agree with the author that history is far more engaging when presented warts-and-all, and with focus on the major debates and controversies of the time, instead of burnishing the reputations of all the major figures and presenting American history as a series of inexorable steps towards world hegemony. Also, it is terribly embarrassing that the United States accuses other countries of white-washing their pasts in their history classes, when of course America does the same thing, if perhaps to a lesser degree. Loewen presents many concrete examples of major omissions in history textbooks, from Columbus' enslavement of native Americans to Woodrow Wilson's overt racism.

However. As many other reviewers here have noted, Loewen wears his left-wing biases flagrantly on his sleeve. I first noticed this in Chapter 2, when the author notes that Christopher Columbus is portrayed as "brave, wise, and godly" during his first transatlantic voyage, while "the sailors are stupid, superstitious, cowardly, and sometimes scheming". This description is harmful because "these portrayals amount to an 'anti-working class pro-boss polemic'". That is just the first of many instances where Loewen advances a personal viewpoint in critiquing the history texts. I find this a shame, because I agree with his general principle: Textbooks do contain harmful inaccuracies, from downplaying the complexity of native American cultures, to ignoring the government's open support of racist policies after the end of Reconstruction, to forgetting to mention the brutal and undemocratic regimes the United States supported during the Cold War. However, Loewen overplays his politically correct hand so strongly, it masks his overall point. The reader is forced to split the difference between the conservative, overly patriotic slant displayed by the textbooks and the doomsayer socialist slant of the author.

Loewen states that textbooks should not present such a Eurocentric view because it harms the worldview of minority students. I believe that historical accuracy is a goal for its own sake. If textbooks would relate a true narrative about how America came to be where it is today, including both the proud triumphs and the embarrassing missteps, students would become interested in and even passionate about history. "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is good at showing some of the many areas where history textbooks fall short.

As a conservative white male who views revisionist history quite skeptically, I did not expect much from this book. As a student of American history, I understood what a woeful job our textbooks and (unfortunately) our teachers do in teaching the actual history of this country, but I never expected both the depth and the level of scholarship Mr. Loewen presents in this book. It is well researched, well written and much needed. Having grown up near an Indian reservation, my own personal studies in original sources confirm how accurate Mr. Loewen really is. The book is hardly "political correctness" run amuck as suggested by one review. And his point is not to paint America as evil or bash Christian Europeans as two other reviews would lead us to believe. This type of simple minded attack does not tell us anything about the book, but rather betrays the reviewers' own entrenched viewpoints - viewpoints that certainly will not be changed by exposure to the truth. In fact, the criticisms make Mr. Loewen's point almost better than he can as to why history is taught in feel-good myths rather than truth. Yes, Mr. Loewen treats certain issues and not others. He tells us he is doing so several times throughout the book, and makes apologies for it. This is not intended to be a replacement for a full history of the United States. Mr. Loewen makes good and valid suggestions as to such replacements. It is not even intended to be a complete coverage of all the things our history texts get wrong. He would need several more volumes for that, and even then would get some of it wrong. For those who actually read the book (and many reviewers obviously did not), he admits all of this. Mr. Loewen's book is an important start. But it is only a start. One reviewer, in criticising the book, stated that we must learn from our past. But this is exactly the point of the book. We must and can learn from our past, but only if we have the objectivity and moral courage to accept what that past was. As a white Christian Anglo-Saxon male, I feel no need to beat myself up as a result of the deeds done by white Christian Anglo-Saxon males who are long dead. But I do feel the need to move forward with as good an understanding as I can have of the cultural and personal histories that cause people to act as they do - especially those whose backgrounds are so different from my own.

American history is very badly taught at the high school level. I've known that for years. But Lies My Teacher Told Me helped me understand why, and the great damage this does to our country.

The book takes myths we've all been told and explodes them, and shows the danger of teaching our children things that are patently untrue. I'm something of a history buff, but this book kept hitting me with facts, causes, and interpretations that were new to me.

And the book is not an anti-American diatribe, although some would certainly see it as that. For instance, it offers evidence of far stronger anti-slavery feelings in the Civil War North than I had ever realized existed.

Yes, the author has an axe to grind, and the examples he pulls from the textbooks he discusses are probably the worst ones. But his axe is aimed at bad education, which seems worth attacking.

What's more, the book is well written. An entertaining read.

I think the best way to explain my reaction to this book is to describe a similar reaction I've had to some recent television commercials. I'm not a smoker and I never have been. I think smoking kills people and I don't like it when people smoke cigarettes around me. That being said, whenever I see one of those smug, self-righteous anti-tobacco commercials from thetruth.com there's nothing I want to do more than smoke my way through a whole pack and then pass out cartons of cigarettes to everyone I meet. The very positive message of the ads is destroyed by the delivery.

Well, Loewen evoked the same response in me with Lies Across America. It's a good book, thorough and well-researched, yet easy to read. Loewen points out the distortions of our nation's history in monuments and historical markers around the country. As he clearly demonstrates, many of these are nothing more than propaganda, mythology, and apologism -- and more than a few describe events that never actually occurred.

I found myself in total agreement with Loewen about the foolishness of Europeans "discovering" various parts of America, about Columbus "proving the world was round", and about the white-washing of a number of men who were admittedly pretty bad. And yet I found myself hoping that all those misleading monuments remained untouched and as is, if only to throw it back in the face of this sanctimonious, holier-than-thou jerk.

This is not the kind of response a book like this should generate. Loewen has a mission, which is to inject at least a little bit more of the real story into the way history is presented today. A book that aims in part to convert people to a new way of looking at something should definitely *not* be grating, self-righteous, and irritating.

So I give the book five stars for tackling an important topic, making some very important points, and for being thoroughly researched yet accessible. I'm forced to subtract two stars because I found Loewen's delivery so annoying that I didn't care whether he was right or not -- I just wanted to be against whatever he was for.

Definitely worth a read, but try to focus on the message and not the presentation.

Lies Across America is not a book that will give the reader warm fuzzies about America, baseball, and apple pie. In fact the tone of the book is sarcastic (though occassionally humerous)and accusatory. But if Loewen's book can get people to think about American history and get them out to visit historical sites, it can't be all bad. By far the most interesting essays in the book are those concerning the Confederacy and the South in general. Mr. Loewen paints all rebel soldiers as hideous, vile harbingers of hate, disease and famine, the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy as neo-Nazis and every black person or Native American who ever lived as a persecuted saint waiting for their holiday. The fact is, Mr. Loewen takes history too personal. He does an excellent job covering the Civil Rights movement but I think he doesn't totally understand the progress of ideas from 1865 to 1954 and on to today. Most white southerners today think the world is much better than it was in 1865 or before the Civil Rights movement. To get along in the world today we must work out issues that are much deeper than just agreeing that some historical figures had flawed ideas. Sometimes a hitorical marker is just a marker, and a statue is just a place for children to play around.

A fascinating review of the less-than-savory aspects of American history, as inspired by the fallacious, misleading, and amnesiac monuments and "historical" markers that populate the landscape from sea to shining sea. Much more than just a look at historical errors, the book is a scathing and unrelenting expose of the pernicious mythologies perpetuated in the name of history, as a subtle (and sometimes overt) means by which our collective memory is subverted and manipulated. Loewen is at heart an idealist, who sees things as they could be, and asks "why not?", an outlook that has gotten others in hot water before. His thesis seems to be that to benefit from history, we must first learn history, embrace it, and teach it, in all it's blemished and tarnished glory. As long as we continue to allow history to be distorted, revised, and altered to suit the propagandist needs of political ideologies, we build our world viewpoint on shifting sands of myth and fantasy, for which we and our future generations will pay a hefty price. Written with wit and, at times, biting sarcasm, Loewen's book is an enjoyable and yet disturbing guidebook to American Memory Lane, a journey that, without the doses of reality his book provides, might at times resemble more a confusing ride through the hall of mirrors. A book well worth reading, digesting, and discussing, I was sorry when it ended.