Lies My Teacher Told Me Essay

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The national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen’s novel provides the truth about some misconceptions in American history. Though some wonderful and some ghastly, Lies My Teacher Told Me includes ten chapters of amazing stories in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate more details but events and processes with important consequences. Since the book is about the truth about events that are well-known in history, it is non-fiction and there is no set setting. It begins with the early 1900s when Helen Keller was a radical socialist and Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist. It then moves back in time to the late 1400s, early 1500s, when Columbus supposedly discovered America, when in truth the Africans did. Next, it moves on to the early 1600s to when the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts and had the First Thanksgiving. Next, the book jumps to the mid 1700s to early 1800s to tell about the Native Americans and their struggle with Whites for their ancestral land. This leads to the mid and late 1800s, when slavery was a key issue and people like John Brown and Abraham Lincoln were alive. The book ends in the 1900s, explaining how social class affects everyone and also about the Vietnam War. Loewen provides the reader with an introduction to the book, explaining the reason why he wrote this book. He explains to us his thesis about how history textbooks alter what really happened and even sometimes make up inaccurate detail to make the story or even sound better. His last two chapters of the book uses all the amazing stories that he told in the preceding chapters to further support his thesis. Chapter Eleven explains how textbooks are created to explain what causes them to be so bad. Chapter Twelve explains the results of using standard American history textbooks and how they can actually make students
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