The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader
Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the acts of neo-Confederates afterward. For example, two-thirds of Americans--including most history teachers--think the Confederate States seceded for "states' rights." This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. Now we are marking the 150th anniversary of secession and Civil War. Surely it's time to get this history right! The first secession document, South Carolina's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" actually opposes states' rights. Mississipp's Declaration says, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world." Later documents show how neo-Confederates lied about all this in the twentieth century. The most recent document -- Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue's 2008 "Confederate History Month Proclamation," shows a new twist. Now Neo-Confederates claim that thousands of African Americans "saw action in the Confederate armed forces in many combat roles." The book shows what's wrong with this claim and also explains why it is crucial to get this history right in the 21st century. Learn More...
Teaching What Really Happened
Loewen's new book calls K-12 teachers to teach history and social studies in a new way. It offers teachers specific ideas for how to get students excited about history, how to get them to DO history, and how to help them read critically. It also helps teachers tackle difficult but important topics like the American Indian experience, slavery, and race relations. Learn More...
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
(Gustavus Myers Human Rights Book Award, Selected by Booklist as a 2005 Editor's Choice Selection)
From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by "kinder gentler means." Sundown Towns [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD or Download) Learn More...
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong
American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate history teaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The stories they tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not been already. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. No wonder students lose interest. We have got to do better. Learn More...
Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
Did you know that the automobile was invented in rural Wisconsin? That a Texas preacher beat the Wright brothers by a year, in a plane inspired by the word of God? That four different people in three different states "first" used anesthesia in an operation? That Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin in Kentucky built 30 years after his death? Those things never happened, of course, but the landscape commemorates them anyway.
Lies Across America teaches visitors to read between the lines of historical markers and to deconstruct the sculptures on monuments and memorials. Viewed in this way, the lies and omissions across the American countryside suggest times and ways that the United States went astray as a nation. Learn More...
The Mississippi Chinese : Between Black and White
This scholarly, carefully researched book studies one of the most overlooked minority groups in America - the Chinese of the Mississippi Delta. During Reconstruction, white plantation owners imported Chinese sharecroppers in the hope of replacing their black laborers. In the beginning they were classed with blacks. But the Chinese soon moved into the towns and became almost without exception, owners of small groceries. Loewen details their astounding transition from "black" to essentially white status. Learn More...
Mississippi : Conflict and Change
First-year students at Tougaloo College taught me that they had absorbed a white supremacist false narrative of their past, even in all-Black high schools. As a result, I put together a team of students and faculty at Tougaloo and from nearby Millsaps College and wrote a new history of the state. Historian Lawrence Goodwyn called Mississippi: Conflict and Change "the best history of an American state I have ever seen." It won the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction of 1975, but the State of Mississippi rejected it for school use, leading to the lawsuit Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al., finally won in 1980. This link leads to several resources for teaching about Mississippi. Learn More...
The Validity of "Standardized" Testing in Education and Employment
When I first went to Tougaloo College in 1968, I found that my students had low SAT scores - 240 to 580. Yet my best students were equal to my best students at Harvard, where I had just taught. The SAT put Tougaloo students in a defensible order within their environment, but a 560 at Tougaloo was far better than a 560 at Harvard. Soon I realized that Tougaloo students - black, poor, rural - had grown up as distant from the SAT makers - white, rich, suburban - as was possible within the United States.
Further research showed me that SAT (and ACT) scores correlate very poorly with the outcome they are intended to predict: first-year college grades.
Those two facts have underlain my intermittent work since 1970, mostly aimed at showing the bias in these tests and how they should not be used in college admissions. Learn More...
A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. A researcher who discovered that many, and in many states most communities were "Sundown Towns" that kept out blacks (and sometimes other groups) for decades. (Some still do.) An educator who attended Carleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, spent seven years teaching at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and then taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont. 
Everything You've Been Taught is Wrong: Fact, Fiction, and Lies in American History: 14 Lectures (Audio CD)
Lies My Teacher Told Me [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)
