Dr. James W. Loewen, Ph.D.
James Loewen, sociologist and advocate for improved history teaching, is the teaching of history, is the keynote speaker for the 13th Annual Urban Forum Nov. 5. This year’s Urban Forum has been organized into a two-part series, with a second Urban Forum scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010.
Loewen, who will speak at 6:00 p.m. at the Zelazo Center is the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong.” The book, published in 1995, has sold more than a million copies and won the American Book Award. Based on a two-year analysis of 12 leading high school textbooks on American History, Lowewen concluded the books then in use offered “an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds.”
Loewen, who earned his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, taught race relations at the University of Vermont for 20 years. He continues to conduct research and write from his Washington D.C. base.
Loewen’s interest in the use of history textbooks as “weapons” of mass misinformation, he writes in his latest book “Teaching What Really Happened,” grew out of his own early experiences teaching a freshman social science seminar at historically black Tougaloo University in Mississippi. He was appalled to find his students, almost all of them black, repeating a white supremacist version of Reconstruction as historical fact. He quickly found that this was what they had learned in their high school textbooks.
Working with another editor from a nearby all-white college, Loewen helped write a new high school textbook, designed to present Mississippi history in light of actual historical research. That book also challenged students to think about their state’s history in the context of current events.
The textbook won the Lillian Smith Award for best Southern nonfiction the year it came out, but the Mississippi State Textbook Board rejected it as unsuitable for use in Mississippi schools. Loewen, his co-author and three school systems that wanted to use the book eventually sued the state textbook board in federal court.
Loewen writes of the dispute: “Our book was not biased toward African Americans. Six of its eight authors were white, as were 80 percent of the historical characters who made it into our index. An index 20 percent nonwhite looks pretty black, however, to
people who are used to textbooks wherein just 2 percent of the people referred to are nonwhite.”
After expert testimony on the book’s historical accuracy and merit, the Loewen group won the 1980 court case, a decision the American Library Association ranks as one of its “notable First Amendment court cases.”
Loewen’s latest book continues his efforts to improve the teaching of history. Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” wrote of “Teaching What Really Happened:”
“James Loewen's new book should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country. It is not only a devastating critique of how our nation's history has been taught in our schools, but also a wonderful guide to how the teaching of history can open up minds, excite the imagination, and educate a new generation dedicated to making this a better world.”
