Lies My Teacher Told Me for Young Readers: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

James Loewen · Rebecca Stefoff

Apr 2019 · RB Media · Narrated by L.J. Ganser

About this audiobook

Now adapted for young readers ages 12 through 18, the national bestseller that makes real American history come alive in all of its conflict, drama, and complexity Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important-and successful-history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. Now Rebecca Stefoff, the acclaimed nonfiction children's writer who adapted Howard Zinn's bestseller A People's History of the United States for young readers, makes Loewen's beloved work available to younger students. Essential reading in our age of fake news and slippery, sloppy history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition cuts through the mindless optimism and outright lies found in most textbooks that are often not even really written by their "authors." Loewen is, as historian Carol Kammen has said, the history teacher we all should have had. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and then covering characters and events as diverse as the first Thanksgiving, Helen Keller, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen's lively, provocative telling of American history is a "counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past" (The Nation). This streamlined young readers' edition is rich in vivid details and quotations from primary sources that poke holes in the textbook versions of history and help students develop a deeper understanding of our world. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers' Edition brings this classic text to a new generation of readers (and their parents and teachers) who will welcome and value its honesty, its humor, and its integrity.

Ratings and reviews

As a history teacher, I'm often disturbed by school textbooks that downplay US atrocities like slavery and Jim Crow. Teachers also have to explain to students that, although victims of 9/11 were non-combatant, innocent civilians simply going about their daily routines (which IS true), the authorized textbooks only allow us to subtly speak of 9/11 as an immoral and unprecedented occurence; those same books fail to address USA dropping 2 nukes on Japanese civilians under identical circumstances.

exceptional book. The author provides various sources when providing corrections for many of our American History textbooks. recommend this book to anyone that "learned" American History from school textbooks, which often leave out nuance to shape the narrative into one of American excellence and a European centric approach to history.