“Well,” he recalled them saying, “Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when Blacks took over the government of the Southern states. Facing his first freshman class, he posed a seemingly simple question for 17 students: “What is Reconstruction?” Loewen was raised in Illinois and educated in Minnesota and at Harvard, and he began his half-century as a university professor of sociology in 1968 at Tougaloo College, a historically Black liberal arts institution in Mississippi. Historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears.” “I think we’re stupider in thinking about the past than we are, say, in thinking about Shakespeare, or algebra, or other subjects. “History is by far our worst-taught subject in high school,” Dr. It was invented 242 years later by Abraham Lincoln to celebrate the North’s victory at Gettysburg. The holiday Americans celebrate has nothing to do with the Pilgrims. The settlers had no wheat flour for crust and no oven for baking. No turkey was served in 1621 - perhaps it was duck. And it was a mistake to get him started on the origin of Thanksgiving: Plymouth was already a village with cleared fields when the Pilgrims found it deserted by plague victims. He wrote another about how America’s historic sites distort our knowledge of the past. He charged through history like a warrior, dismantling fictions and exposing towns for excluding minorities teachers and historians for dumbing lessons down and defendants in 50 class-action lawsuits who, according to his expert testimony, victimized people in civil rights, voting rights and job discrimination cases.Ī Northerner fascinated with Mississippi, he wrote his first book about the Chinese population there. Loewen was a relentless contrarian who challenged anyone who imagined academic life as a passage through genteel lectures on settled matters for drowsy students on leafy campuses.

Loewen wrote in “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” (1995), the best known of his dozen books attacking historical misconceptions.ĭr.

“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the 11th grade,” Dr. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Ellen Adler, his publisher at the New Press, who said he died after an unspecified “long illness.” Loewen, a sociologist and civil rights champion who took high school teachers and textbook publishers to task for distorting American history, particularly the struggle of Black people in the South, by oversimplifying their experience and omitting the ugly parts, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md.

James w loewen