What if the most “basic” stories you learned about U.S. history were edited for comfort instead of truth? In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen explains how mainstream textbooks turn the past into a tidy, conflict-free tale—sanding down controversy, skipping inconvenient facts, and “heroifying” real people into flawless icons. The result: history feels boring, students memorize but don’t understand, and we lose the habit of asking who benefits from this version of the story? Loewen walks through the recurring patterns—omissions about race and class, sanitized accounts of U.S. foreign policy, and myths that shape how we interpret today’s headlines. The payoff isn’t cynicism. It’s a toolkit for becoming a sharper reader of any narrative: spot bias, check sources, compare viewpoints, and refuse the easy story when the real one is more complicated—and more useful.
