My high school history teacher recommended his book to me when I was junior. I loved it, and even wrote to the author regarding a mistake I thought I found in the book (pretty arrogant of me). Loewen replied generously. I don't remember the exact exchange, but he was so encouraging. It meant a lot to me in high school that he replied.
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.
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.
I grew up in a very white, very affluent area. I was gobsmacked when I learned about sunset laws, that most of the prime real estate had been seized during the internment of Japanese, etc, etc. Topics definitely not taught in school, nor discussed in the press.
FWIW, my introduction to a lot of these topics and themes was David Neiwert's Orcinus blog in the aughts. https://dneiwert.blogspot.com
Met him over a decade ago while I was doing undergrad. Dude wanted to go hang out with 18 year old anarchists. I liked his optimism about the brotherhood of man, but he voiced a few non-scientific opinions about GMOs that rubbed me the wrong way.
> From the authors own viewpoint, he would want us to investigate that for ourselves.
That is not what his book said. It said nothing about having kids or anyone investigate independently.
The book listed multiple ways in which textbooks mislead, leave important parts of story put or even directly lie. The book claims these have consequences (to large extend in making history boring and unreal).
I remember bringing up the racist parts of Gone with the Wind with my parents and having an extremely illuminating conversation on their thoughts and attitudes.
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.
Thanks for explaining the joke /s, but the explanation will probably be valuable to people.
All that really happened — it’s not just a joke. The incident which caused me to be suspended involved getting chased around backstage by a friend with a fire extinguisher. Which, ironically, is one thing that would have helped Atlanta.
I read Lies My Teacher Told Me many moons ago, and it was great because it was so eye-opening, an easy read, and the guy the just seemed like a real one.
He was in the early battles against the white supremacist texas education officials.
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.
This sparks some interest in me, as I don't see what is surprising about the things she spoke about. Why/how are folks surprised? They expected more racism?
I grew up in the twilight of the Cold War and there was definitely a lot of side eye thrown at socialists, labor agitators and pacifists of all kinds. I did have one teacher who proudly shared Helen Keller’s letter to the students who burned her books in Nazi Germany.
——
To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.
As a broader concept, this is also an excellent lesson in recognising a missing message. If something is talked about and praised, but always left confusingly vague ... either the speaker is hiding something, or they're aware that they cannot directly mention the subject or events. Either way, it's an invitation to do some digging.
Sometimes you find a Helen Keller. Sometimes you find a Samuel F. B. Morse.
Similar to MLK. Most people seem to ignore that he wrote several books, and most of his books are about overcoming the white oppression and promoting socialism. It is hard to see these books even in bookstores.
>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.
It's a great book, I think Bob Young recommended it to me at Linux expo in 1995 or 1996? Amusingly, that book recommendation is one of the only things I remember from the conference and it's totally linux-unrelated. :)
I would have found history in school much more interesting if it reflected the content of that book.
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.
> Further, number of casualties is a perfectly fine argument for "who sacrificed the most," but not necessarily for who "won" the war.
Exactly. It's possible to have that many casualties and then lose the war. All those casualty numbers tell us is that the war on the Eastern front was far more brutal than the war on the Western front, not how strategically important the victory on either front ended up being.
> "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."
It's equally wrong to say that the USSR won the war as it is to say the US did, but the USSR unquestionably paid the highest price to ensure the Allies won.
'Only' about half of those were in Russia itself. Breaking things out by Soviet 'provinces', which are now independent countries: Belarus had 2.3M and Ukraine had 6.9M.
Absolute numbers also don't tell the whole story: 25% of Belarus' population was killed, while 'only' 12.7% of Russia's was. Ukraine, 16.3%; Latvia, 13.7%; Armenia, 13.7%; Poland, 17%.
While it's worth noting the individuals nationalities of those that died, you can compare any one of them to the US's .32% of the population killed to see the point I am making.
When a group works well together you can't find any single winner when they succeed. Russia and the rest barely worked together at all, but still worked together well enough that you cannot find a single winner.
Yep the US was an important arms dealer, getting rich selling weapons to Europeans. No argument there. It also helped defeating what remained of the Nazi soldiers after millions had already been killed by Europeans and Russians. Also no argument there. However going from there to say that the US won the war is unbelievably disrespectful to the millions of people who died fighting the Nazis for years before the US finally decided to play an active role.
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.
