December Reading, continued

[ellarien]

Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen

I never had an American history textbook, as such. Looking back, I suspect I picked up most of my early impressions of American history from primary-school [US elementary school] 'reading books' [US: readers], Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Louisa May Alcott. Much later, I ploughed through And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmeyer, but without any background, the history didn't stick beyond an impression that there was a lot of politics. The last few years, I've been trying to educate myself more, in a dilettantish way, reading about explorers and surveyors and founding fathers. For a broader overview, I read Paul Johnson's A History of the American People, which left me with the feeling that I probably needed to find something with equal and opposite biases. (I'm reasonably sure that Nixon as a near-saint unjustly destroyed by the liberal media isn't quite a mainstream view.) However, I didn't pick the Loewen book up for that purpose, but had it lying around for a while after Amazon recommended it when I first went looking.


This was a fascinating and thought-provoking read. It's written as an indictment of bland, thought-suppressing, Eurocentic high-school textbooks, by way of bringing out facets that get usually get overlooked or misrepresented. Helen Keller was a socialist? Woodrow Wilson a racist? Columbus landed on what is now Haiti and strip-mined it for slaves, starting the process that rapidly exterminated the original inhabitants? I had no idea. I had a bit more inkling, from some of my other reading, about what happened to the Native Americans. I kept wanting to check my other books: did Johnson even mention that? What did H. W Brands' The First American even mention Franklin being sent to the Iroqois in 1775? (Barely, and no, respectively.)

I wonder, too, how much my own O-level history course (Revolution, Reaction and Reform: Europe 1793-1870) missed out or glossed over. No doubt plenty, in the course of boiling a turbulent period down to bullet-point wars and treaties, laws and protests, but at least we didn't try to cover the whole history of the continent, or even the last four hundred years of it, in that two-year course!