Lies My Teacher Told Me

"Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself." -Howard Zinn

A new edition of the national bestseller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times in the summer of 2006.

For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be "objective."

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls "an extremely convincing plea for truth in education." In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should--and could--be taught to American students.

Best-selling book in the history of The New Press: the paperback edition The New Press licensed to Simon and Schuster has sold over 2 million copies; The New Press has now taken back paperback rights.

New Preface by the author Simon and Schuster issued a revised edition in 2007 updated the book with new sections on 9/11 and the Iraq war. The new preface to the 15th anniversary edition with talk about current issues in the way we talk about history, including on our historical monuments.

Active marketing by author: James Loewen will continue to promote these re-issued texts and use them as a platform for commentary on the issues of the day.

James W. Loewen is the bestselling and award-winning author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus, and Sundown Towns, all published by The New Press. He also wrote Teaching What Really Happened and edited The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. He has won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship, and the Spirit of America Award from the National Council for the Social Studies. In 2012, the American Sociological Association gave him its Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award; he is the only white person to win this honor. Loewen is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont and lives in Washington, D.C.