Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by
James W. Loewen
My rating:
2 of 5 stars
Another book I forgot I had read before. New review is here at top, and it dropped it a star. Old review is below.
Not Loewen’s best. Not even close.
First, credit where credit is due. His chapters on high school history and its textbooks neglecting class-based issues and what he calls anti-racism are spot on. The chapter on racism is generally good, though it has problems here and there.
BUT ….
Most of his claim of pre-Viking contact with the New World by Europeans, Phoenicians or Chinese is overstated to way overstated. See
Wiki's page for more.
West Africans by accident I might buy, just maybe. The idea that Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa is still not settled, and Herodotus’ story of it is a jumbled mess. I have no problem with buying that their Carthaginian successors sailed westward through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic, visiting the various island systems later claimed by Spain or Portugal, and perhaps getting as far as the mouth of the Niger River. But circumnavigation? Color me skeptical.
Books written about the Chinese sailing to the New World? I’ve read one, that by Gavin Menzies, his 1421 book; laughable. (It was written after this book.) Other than in late Yuan, then early Ming times, the Chinese are never recorded as being either that good at, or that interested in, overseas mariner trips. And they're never at all recorded as sailing eastward to anywhere east of Japan or southeastward anywhere past the Philippines.
The Polynesian-South American connection is the only one that is even halfway realistic. At least Loewen has the honesty to admit many of these theories are ultimately based on racist ideas that lack credence.
And I had NEVER before heard claims that American Indians visited the Roman Empire. Given the above, I’ll take that with a HUGE grain of salt. And, rightly so.
I have learned how that claim arose.
How Loewen got to be this GULLIBLE, I don’t know. It’s no wonder that Howard Zinn, whose “People’s History” is itself historically problematic, so enthusiastically blurbs this book.
Loewen in body text, outside of footnotes does rate many as low, but the Afrocentric and Phoenician ones as “moderate.”
I’m a leftist myself who rejects Eurocentric bullshit, but I also reject non-Eurocentric bullshit being peddled just to reject Eurocentric bullshit. And, he references “
They Came Before Columbus” in his bibliography, a horrid, non-historical Afrocentric book. He also references a book called “
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.”
From there, he uncritically repeats legends that Columbus was not Italian, that he was a Jew, etc. Let's look at all of these to refute each one.
He actually didn’t speak “Italian” because he likely spoke Ligurian, which is considered a separate language not a dialect. Well, Chaucer didn't speak "English" only a little over a century earlier. Two centuries earlier, Dante spoke "Tuscan," not "Italian," by a reasonable argument. He didn't write anything in Ligurian for a variety of reasons; as for the Jew claim and writing, we have no writing of his in Ladino, we know that and the thinnest of speculations otherwise.
In claiming Columbus was really appreciated, he cites his second voyage of 1493. So? Doesn’t change that he still died neglected in 1506, because he clearly had not gotten to China or India. Loewen next tries to explain away Columbus’ size-of-earth geography errors by claiming he wasn’t necessarily sailing for “Cathay” or similar at all. Totally untrue. He lobbied both Ferdinand and Isabella — and the king of Portugal — to support his journey to precisely the known lands of the Far East, and both countries (taking Spain as one country) rejected him because they figured he was underestimating the size of the Earth. Spain finally funded him after the Reconquista was done and it had a few spare dollars, but the monarchs sure as hell didn’t fund a voyage to “whatever I find,” but a voyage to the known Far East.
If not gullibleness, this is pandering of some sort.
Beyond all that, if this is about "Europeans bad," etc.? Well, Han Chinese have their own history of colonization, from the Miao and other non-Han of the Yunnan area to Xinjiang and Tibet.
Next chapter? Two pages in, he repeats the largely discredited legend of Marranos being a major part of Spanish settlement of New Mexico. Were there a FEW conversos? Yes. A bunch, let alone unconverted Jews? No.
Most these people are Adventist Protestant Christians. And even if some went to Mexico, fewer yet moved 1,000 miles north.
Surprisingly, on the Pilgrims not landing in the theoretically intended Virginia, Loewen does NOT mention the idea that they ran out of beer. And yes, that's been postulated.
There’s other errors. Yes, the Dutch build Fort Nassau on the Hudson in 1614. They abandoned it again in 1618; it’s unclear whether the Pilgrims knew that or not.
He also ignores that, among Pilgrim critiques, Oñate was probably the first European to celebrate a Thanksgiving on US soil, in addition to pre-Pilgrim Native American ones.
His chapter on American Indians over-nice-ifies them. The Aztec and Inca empires, and the non-Aztec Indians who supported Cortez, are immediate refutations.
He hints at accepting at least parts of the Iroquois Confederation being behind the US Constitution legend. The eagle on the Great Seal? Symbol of many European nations, as well. And ignores that Franklin argued against it.
Chief Seattle’s “letter” or “speech”? Of doubtful authenticity.
==
Not bad, but definitely not his best. In "Lies Across America," Loewen writes short chapters of no more than 7-8 pages about historic sites and monuments and what they get wrong, and does well. In "Sundown Towns," he writes a one-subject book on how sundown towns developed in America and still persist today, with a LOT of good information.
Both are good, and the former, debunking book doesn't get too polemical.
However, this book does, and sometimes gets things wrong, or at least distorted, itself, as part of the polemics. I talk about lengths above, precisely because I think the longer chapters in this book give Loewen too much free rein.
A few specifics:
1. He goes overboard on how negatively he portrays Columbus
2. He partially repeats a refuted myth of how the Iroquois Confederation allegedly influenced the structure of the US Constitution.
3. He claims "OK" is probably of Indian (Native American) etymology, when, among serious study, none of the leading theories for its origin claim that.
4. And strangely, he seems to let the Russians off lightly on their treatment of native Americans, when in reality, they were worse than the white descendants of British settlers, or the French, Spanish or any other European group. Indeed, other than mentioning the Inuit and Aleut having a separate migration to North America, Alaska is generally ignored by him and Hawaii entirely so.
And, the process of putting this all on paper led me to knock this down from 4 to 3 stars. The man is an academic historian, and should know better on the items above, especially 2-4.
View all my reviews
Fortunately, as noted midway through the renewed review, I've become a more skeptical leftist than I was 7 years ago at the time of the first review.
And, going beyond the second-round review, the book has other problems yet.
First, "They Came Before Columbus" is racist on multiple grounds. The author, of at least partially African ancestry, perpetuates myths about sub-Saharan Africans, in part. No, they don't all look alike on stereotypical "Nubian" features. Second, it's racism; Loewen won't go that far in even a footnote. But it is, and no, SJW snowflakes, racism isn't entirely a "privilege" based mindset. It's easier to be openly racist if you can punch down rather than up, but racism stems out of xenophobia partially driven by evolutionary biology.
Can blacks be racist? Yes? Are they? Yes. The same is also true for American Indians. Both have "punched sideways" against one another more publicly, but they've also punched up.
Second, Loewen's lucky I didn't 1-star him for citing a book on reincarnation as a source. (Sadly, when it came out, the august AMA was more more credulous about reincarnation than I think, and hope, it is today.)
Third, going beyond point 4 from my first review (the second sentence was added at the second review), Loewen's lies focus on Anglo America. I'm now wondering (as I have a copy) if "Lies Across America" similarly understates things like Hispanic-based lies about American Indians. Or American Indian lies on tribal lands.
Fourth, to follow up on a point from my re-reading, and tying to point 1? American Indians weren't Rousselian "noble savages." The Sioux Sun Dance was self-inflicted, and really not much worse than the most severe flagellations of Catholic Penitents. We can set it aside. But, Aztecs ripping still beating hearts out of live humans? Or death by torture of being tied to a staked anthill? Europe had nothing like it. And, although slaves were not generally sold or traded, and since they were enslaving each other and thus didn't develop racist-based theories to justify slavery, American Indians indeed
enslaved each other more than Loewen would have the reader infer. And, in some cases, slaves WERE traded and slavery was made hereditary. And, in the ultimate grisly story of conspicuous consumption, among some Pacific tribes, slaves were allegedly
killed at potlatches. (Google returns
more than 500K hits.)
Fifth, based on a pamphlet-level book, "
Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus," that was apparently extracted from this book, Loewen seems to have a "thing" for proving "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" myths so wrong that he'll grasp at straws. Based on editorial review at Goodreads, it appears he doubles down on, and even firms up his support for, all the untruths noted above.
