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Home - News
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Teaching Truth
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Best-selling author and sociologist visits UNO
by Jill Bruckner Robberts
Things are not always as they seem. Such is the state of U.S. history: often skewed, sometimes tainted and constantly evolving.
Enter James Loewen, Ph.D., a best-selling author and sociologist committed to revealing history as it occurred, rather than as Americans may have wished it to be.
While educators may generally feel history is accurately portrayed in textbooks, Loewen counters this comfortable assertion. His book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, his, critics suggest, creating some “outrage” regarding what is taught as truth in America’s schools.
A Harvard graduate and 20-year race-relations professor at the University of Vermont, Loewen will appear at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Thompson Alumni Center at 6 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 8.
Omahans can expect to be entertained, Loewen said of his lecture, and will also “learn about an era of American history that they had never heard of before, a period with profound implications for us today.”
“I first had the fortune of meeting Dr. Loewen back around 1997/98 while I was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park campus,” said Lory Janelle Dance, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Dance and her colleagues were instrumental in securing Loewen’s appearance.
“Since then, I have invited him to speak at the University of Maryland and counted him among my list of most important colleagues,” Dance added. “Dr. Loewen’s academic work gives life and complexity to important people, events, and topics often left out of historical stories. Since leaving the University of Maryland three semesters ago, I have looked forward to the moment when I could facilitate Dr. Loewen’s visit to Nebraska. That moment will come this week. This is an academic dream come true.”
Loewen is equally enthusiastic about his Omaha lecture, and said he hopes readers of Lies My Teacher Told Me will “give the book away. Seriously, if they are shocked by what they learn, and most will be, then they should give their copy to the high school U.S. History teacher who did not teach them this stuff, probably because they did not know it.”
In fact, Loewen describes American history as “… an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism and plain misinformation” — a view he developed following two years of research at the Smithsonian Institute, where he analyzed 12 oft-used, and highly regarded history textbooks.
“Omahans can expect to hear from a true leader and pioneer in the process of challenging and debunking many of the myths and untruths that unfortunately persist in many American high school textbooks and classrooms today,” said Zebulon Miletsky, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and resident historian in the Black Studies Department. “Loewen’s work is up there with folks like Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States has changed the view of history we learn as young people.”
School-taught history, Miletsky explained, is often, “designed to make us good citizens, but not to necessarily ask critical questions,” an assertion Loewen’s work supports. “We ought to demand more from our schools which have educationally cheated many of our young people by not telling the full story of all our ancestors, hence [Loewen’s] title which speaks for itself, Lies My Teacher Told Me,” Miletsky said.
Balancing what Loewen’s work reveals, with efforts to teach history effectively and accurately, can be challenging. Miletsky suggests there are “brilliant and hardworking teachers here in Omaha” who are doing just that.
“Indeed, Loewen is a master teacher himself who cites the many examples of teachers who strive for excellence in the classroom by creating their own materials to teach race and African-American history, as well the histories of shared communities of oppression,” Miletsky said. “I have found that many of my own students find themselves angered, even outraged, about what they didn’t learn in high school, and perhaps would have liked to have learned about African Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans or Latinos, as well as other groups.
Dance is helping area students widen their historical perspective by incorporating Loewen’s materials into her teaching,
“In my courses on American Racial and Ethnic Relations, I have assigned Dr. Loewen’s works to students at the University of Maryland, students at universities in Sweden (including Lund University and Gothenburg Unversity), and now to students at UNL,” she said.
“If I could only use one book in these courses, it would be Dr. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me,” Dance said. “This book has been extremely well received by students in my past courses and has been a great tool for enhancing students’ critical thinking skills.”
Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award, the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and the AESA Critic’s Choice Award. For more on Loewen, visit his homepage: sundown.afro.illinois.edu. |
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