James Loewen, Author of ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me,’ Dies at 79

Kudos to your teacher, for recommending you the book (personally because of your unmanageable curiosity :-) or generally to the class ?). I wish my teachers had tried drowning teenage me with good, challenging books.

Kudos getting the courage to write to an author you admired. Putting your words on paper, letting someone that wrote know that they reached you. That your motives might not gave been noble (arrogant is a good phase to live as a teenager, we need to learn that we are a crafty, amazing bunch, we humans, to celebrate it, and we need to be taught hubris concretely, its positive and negative sides, etc.).

Kudos for him to write you back, with encouraging words. He probably got a good chuckle or two, and took the time, in a way, to show you you'd touched him.

Wholesome human story, thanks for sharing.

My kid, in his first year in a US school, apparently asked the history teacher in class, "Wait, didn't XXX happen in the fashion YYY?"* and was told it wasn't taught that way. I asked her about this in the parent meeting and she said indeed, what he had learned was correct but she needed to teach things in the approved way so that the students would pass the standardized tests.

This isn't meant to imply the US is in some way particularly evil about this -- all countries have some sort of origin myths. This is more a comment on the effect of state level standardized testing.

* actual issue wasn't race-related so I elided it.

There weren't merely sunset towns -- Oregon wrote the sunset clause into it's state constitution!

Can you share more?

Sounds like a healthy skepticism to authority.

History professor not expert in biology! Film at eleven.

I remember when my fourth grade teacher, newly moved in from Georgia, decided to put on a class play of Gone with the Wind. I’m so grateful I annoyed her enough to earn a suspension from school for the remainder of the year, because it was long enough to miss the play. That class was just a lost cause.

My experience was similar. There were definitely aspects of the history which were somewhat familiar to me. The details, however, really fleshed it out.

What was entertaining / illuminating was asking my more-aware American friends questions based on the book, and seeing what they were, or were not, aware of. Helen Keller's an interesting example to use, because she's taught virtually universally in primary school as a hero of the disability-rights movement: she overcame deafness and blindess to become an author and speaker, schools and childrens' books teach ...

... but not what she spoke and wrote about. Which tends not to fit into the public-school curriculum as well. (Though perhaps its one of those submarine lessons, a seed planted to emerge later.)

I've had a lot of fun asking questions about that, watching peoople look up the story, and minds open. (Usually.)

Loewen was an absolute hero. His passing is sad, his gifts are greatly appreciated.

>He was in the early battles against the white supremacist texas education officials.

I find this interesting as I received my education from a texas public school system. It was not a horrible school as it offered AP courses and even started a CompSci class type class my senior year. I focused my energy in math/sciences, and coasted in history/literature. However, as an adult, I'm realizing that the history that was taught definitely left a lot of details out. One thing that I realized was how European focused the history of WWII was, and the Pacific conflict was all focused on the "big ones". A little on Midway, but clearly it was focused on US involvement. There was nothing on what Japan was doing in China, and very little on what Stalin was doing in Russia.

It wasn't until I got to my first few history courses in college that I realized how much of the Civil War was not taught. Go figure from a Texas view point I guess. I had the same professor for the 2 classes I took because I liked how he taught the first class, but then heard from other older students that he was pretty famous for knowing there were blank spots in the average public school curriculums.

> is that the US won the 2nd World war

Without US manufacturing capacity things would have gone differently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Khrushchev:

> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs.[1] "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

* [1] http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/khruschev1/28.html

* https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...

Apparently something like one-third of the tanks during the Battle of Moscow were British:

* https://doi.org/10.1080/13518040903355794

This is not so much a lie as an over-simplification. Anyone suggesting that the US did not play a major role in WW2 is foolish.

I'm sure that as a thought exercise, someone could identify a number of different events or courses of action in WW2 which could have in principle changed the outcome of the war. In that sense, there are many things which "won" WWII.

Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other [guy] die for his." - G.S. Patton

It’s part of the myth Americans teach each other. All countries have their myths and the myths are always constructed to make people feel good about themselves or to make people feel good about how much better they are today. America functioned mostly as an arms dealer during the 2nd world war, getting rich in gold selling weapons to Europe, financing a huge boom in manufacturing that made the US #1 in the world for many years following the 2nd WW. It is absolutely true that the US played a major role in the allied winning the war. But not the way it is told in movies/stories. The majority of Americans, for many years, wanted to do nothing helping Europeans. While millions of Europeans were fighting the Nazis, giving their lives to defend their homes.