skygiants | (no subject)

So, uh, I suspect part of the reason that I was so angry about The Court of the Air is that I read it immediately after reading James Loewens' Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which tears apart exactly the kind of cultural ethnocentrism that got me so mad in Court of the Air.

I've been meaning to read Lies My Teacher Told Me for years, and I'm really glad I finally got around to it. The book is a critique of inaccuracies and incomplete perspectives in high school istory textbooks, but, as well (and more importantly), it's a critique of a way of presenting history - as a set of Indisputable Facts that reinforces a reassuring view of Our History Is the Best History, YAY, with clearly delineated Good Guys and Bad Guys. Loewen mostly dedicates his book to turning up some of the perspectives that destabilize that view, including an emphasis on Native American history and race and class relations, and questioning a lot of the accepted myths that get dunned into students' heads.

In case it is not clear, I think it's hugely worth reading and would recommend it to just about anyone. Loewen is definitely not perfect, and he clearly has his biases too, but his basic point - that it's always better to look at the full confusing complexity of history than to essentialize it - is a thesis I can completely agree with.

(It was also probably kind of appropriate to read it right before Thanksgiving.)

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I love that book. It's one of my favorite books I've read in the past few years. I bought it for my husband last year.

It's awesome.

It really is! I got it out of the library but I suspect I will probably end up owning a copy so I can lend it out to people. (POSSIBLY EVEN THE LIBRARY COPY as I uh may have spilled a little water on it at some point. >.>)

He puts out a new edition every couple of years.

I found his information about Helen Keller very interesting. :)

It made me want to go read Helen Keller's autobiography!

(Mostly what I remembered about Helen Keller before reading the book is the story about how she accidentally plagiarized somebody one time, which is . . . not the most relevant piece of information maybe.)

LOL! I remember the "miracle worker" stuff and not much else. So it was a real eye opener. :)

I've read that book! It was required for my high school AP US History class, which probably says something about the quality of the class in general, but that book was so interesting. I actually ended up using the Helen Keller tidbit in a Heroes fic once. I think I still have the book lying around somewhere...

I wish it had been required for my high school US History class, man. (Well, Government class, because that is what we had to take, which was all about ~Washington politics~, but still.) And hee! Now I am very curious how Helen Keller's socialism came up in Heroes fic. :O

What can I say, I had a really awesome history teacher in high school. *g* (Two, actually, one of whom was for Government--a great class to have during an election year, I can tell you.) Helen Keller came up in Heroes fic because younger!Nathan and highschool!Peter were having a conversation about, well, high school, and Peter was complaining about how his history teacher wasn't really awesome. Obviously Peter knows random trivia about Helen Keller. Obviously.

Lucky! I had a bunch of pretty good teachers, but none that were quite that good.

*cracks up* Of course Peter knows Helen Keller was a socialist. He probably read Lies My Teacher Told Me just so he could recite facts self-righteously at Nathan!

I'm sure that's part of it, but I also feel like COMMUNITYIST CARLISM would be a headache even without James Loewen's careful tutelage.

I love Loewen, though. His "Lies Across America" is also good, though I felt like his blind spots came through more clearly in it. (There's a bit where he's talking about Amherst College - Named After The Most Evil Man Ever! - and he's all, "I bet college students here don't even know what he did!" and, um, dude, you could've asked them, because ... my experience has been that they do. Which would have been a lot more nuanced than "tsk tsk, the ignorance of kids today." And there's another whole section on Indian renaming which is kind of ... Googleably inaccurate.)

Prooooobably this is also true.

I was really curious about that, actually, because I had definitely heard a lot about Lies My Teacher Told Me and not so much about Lies Across America. I should check it out! (Hah, yeah. Occasionally when he is bemoaning the state of the ignorance of the young'uns, I just wanted to pat his head and give him a cane to shake. I think it is works pretty well for him that usually he is writing - at least theoretically - against specific faulty texts instead of towards specific pieces of information, if that makes sense.)

Very good book. And then there's Howard Zinn's People's History of the U.S., which ends up on a lot of the same lists. Never read that one cover-to-cover, but it's great to have for reference.

Oh, cool - and if I remember right Loewens actually mentions Zinn a couple times in his book, which also got him on my radar. Thanks for the rec!