James W. Loewen Quotes - Page 2

I don't think teachers read the textbooks. And I don't think adoption committees read the textbooks before they adopt them. I think they look at them.

You go to towns in Massachusetts, Greenfield, first settled in 1686. Wouldn’t it be cool if it said, “Greenfield. First settled c. 13,000 B.P. or approximately 13,000 Before the Present. Resettled.” Maybe we could say even, “Resettled by whites,” Or, “Resettled anyway, 1686.” It would have a different impact. And of course it would help explain why the town is called Greenfield, because it was a green field and the fields were left by Native people who had already been farming them.

We still have to realize that if you are say a historian of the Civil War, you don’t know anything special about say Columbus or for that matter the 20th century. You are a consumer of that information, especially if it’s stuff like Columbus and the American Indians. That information isn’t even in history, much of it. Much of it is in anthropology or archeology.

Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the west.

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time.

The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.

I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the people who did not write them; so it's a new definition of "author."

There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline.

I often suggest in workshops that if you have 30 students in your American History course in 11th grade, or whatever grade level, that you maybe triple them up. You put, and have them choose, let's say 11 different Native American cultures. Maybe you give them a list of 15 and they choose 11 of those 15 so that they have some choice in the matter.

I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites.

Textbooks are written in an oracular monotone, so that they claim to be true and important.

All of the common core standards stuff about critical reading and critical thinking and so on can only be positive.

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.