Home > Author > James W. Loewen
161 " Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history. "
― James W. Loewen , Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
162 " Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called “hyphenated Americans.” “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” said Wilson, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”27 The American people responded to Wilson’s "
163 " In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort. "
164 " James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a “return to normalcy.” The possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors.32 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known! "
165 " Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself. "
166 " Coming into repeated contact with the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes. "
167 " Europeans believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after “discovering” an island and encountering a tribe of American Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to be called “the Requirement.” Here is one version: I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves. . . . The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.13 Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Native Americans a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards then felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just “discovered. "
168 " If they are left-wing, they can subscribe to Daily Kos and Huffington Post. If they are right-wing, they can subscribe to Breitbart or the Drudge Report.6 Less often do they subscribe to outlets that provide several points of view. As a result, their thinking rarely gets challenged, so they become still less likely or able to assess information critically. "
169 " Ultimately, social class determines how people think about social class. When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system. Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system. (Some people replied “don’t know” or chose a middle position.) The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.15 "
170 " After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies. "
171 " In 1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous “front porch campaign” from his family home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene of an ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. According to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, “As a consequence, Marion is an overwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002]. "
― James W. Loewen , Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
172 " As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once. "
173 " Textbooks could present American Indian religions from a perspective that takes them seriously as attractive and persuasive belief systems.64 The anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that when whites remark upon the fact that Indians perceive a spirit in every animal or rock, they are simultaneously admitting their own loss of a deep spiritual relationship with the earth. Native Americans are “part of the total living universe,” wrote Turner; “spiritual health is to be had only by accepting this condition and by attempting to live in accordance with it.” Turner contends that this life view is healthier than European alternatives: “Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.”65 Thus, Turner shows that taking Native American religions seriously might require reexamination of the Judeo-Christian tradition. No textbook would suggest such a controversial idea. "
174 " Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE3 "
175 " Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, “School is in business to produce reliable people.”17 Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: “It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.”18 Henry Giroux, Freire’s leading disciple "
176 " Surely, in history, “truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost. "
177 " It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one’s opinions to bring them into line with one’s actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as “cognitive dissonance,” according to social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. "
178 " He ended his description of them with these menacing words: “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased. "
179 " the Columbus myth “allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”91 "
180 " In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for "the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown"; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn. "