Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen Read Free Book Online

heroes in American history are. As a rule, they do not pick
     Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, Miles Standish or anyone else in
     Plymouth, John Smith or anyone else in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone else
     in American history whom the textbooks implore them to choose. Our post-Watergate students view all such “establishment” heroes cynically. They're
     bor-r-ring.
    Some students choose “none”that is, they say they have no heroes in American history.
     Other students display the characteristically American sympathy for the underdog by
     choosing African Americans: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, perhaps Rosa Parks,
     Harriet Tubman, or Frederick Douglass. Or they choose men and women from other countries:
     Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, or (now fading fast) Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris
     Yeltsin.
    In one sense this is a healthy development. Surely we want students to be skeptical.
     Probably we want them to challenge being told whom to believe in. But replying “none” is
     too glib, too nihilistic, for my taste. It is, however, an understandable response to
     heroification. For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the
     unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men
     and women to melodramatic stick figures. Their inner struggles disappear and they become
     goody-goody, not merely good.
    Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by passing on Helen Keller jokes. In
     so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled person, they are deflating
     a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real. Nonetheless, our loss of Helen Keller as
     anything but a source of jokes is distressing. Knowing the reality of her quite amazing
     life might empower not only deaf or blind students, but any schoolgirl, and perhaps boys
     as well. For like other peoples around the world, we Americans need heroes. Statements
     such as “If Martin Luther King were alive, he'd . . .” suggest one function of historical figures in our contemporary society. Most of us tend to think well of ourselves when we
     have acted as we imagine our heroes might have done. Who our heroes are and whether they
     are presented in a way that makes them lifelike, hence usable as role models, could have a
     significant bearing on our conduct in the world.
    We now turn to our first hero, Christopher Columbus. “Care should be taken to vindicate
     great names from pernicious erudition,” wrote Washington Irving, defending heroification. Irving's three-volume biography of Columbus, published in 1828, still influences what
     high school teachers and textbooks say about the Great Navigator. Therefore it will come
     as no surprise that heroification has stolen from us the important facets of his life,
     leaving only melodramatic minutiae.
    Columbus is above all the figure with whom the Modern Agethe age by which we may delineate
     these past 500 yearsproperly begins, and in his character as in his exploits we are given
     an extraordinary insight into the patterns that shaped the age at its start and still for
     trie most part shape it today.
    Kirkpatrick Sale As a subject for research, the possibility of African discovery of America has never been
     a tempting one for American historians. In a sense, we choose our own history, or more
     accurately, we select those vistas of history for our examinations which promise us the
     greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to explore the possibility that our
     founding father was a black man.
    History is the polemics of the victor.
    Samuel D. Marble William F. Buckley, Jr.
    What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever
     committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian slaves] as one of the most
     unjust, evil, and cruel among them.
    In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all he