Criticizes the way history is presented in current textbooks, and suggests a fresh and more accurate approach to teaching American history.

Essential reading in our age of fake news and slippery, sloppy history, Lies My Teacher Told Me for Young Readers cuts through the mindless optimism and outright lies featured in most textbooks. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and then covering characters and events as diverse as Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen's lively, provocative telling of American history is a "counter-textbook that...

Zeroes in on ten of the biggest fallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country-- in spite of incontrovertible facts to the contrary.

"The book starts with an account of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620, which is to say that it endorses a very old idea of the best place to catch the first glimmer of the American republic: 1620, not 1619. I'm well aware that the claims of 1620 have their own weaknesses. The country's "very origin," as the Times puts it, isn't something that can be settled once and for all. Many threads from many origins all eventually...

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...

"Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England--the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade--known to early Americans...

"Five hundred years ago, in November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always from the point of view of the Europeans. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were more intrigued by the Roman alphabet than the Spaniards...