Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series)

In this follow-up to his landmark bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated curriculum to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about America’s past. Calling for a new way to teach history, this book 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 will specifically help teachers tackle difficult but important topics like the American Indian experience, slavery, and race relations. Throughout, Loewen shows how “teaching what really happened” not only connects better with all kinds of students, it better prepares those students to be tomorrow’s citizens.

Book features:

• A refreshingly candid assessment of the pitfalls and potential of American history education.
• Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students with the real story of America’s history.
• Strategies for teaching historiography and incorporating project-oriented, self-learning.
• Specific chapters dedicated to the five content topics usually taught particularly badly in today’s schools.

James W. Loewen is the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. He taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont and gives workshops for teacher groups around the United States. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases.

“James Loewen's new book should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country. It is not only a devastating critique of how our nation's history has been taught in our schools, but also a wonderful guide to how the teaching of history can open up minds, excite the imagination, and educate a new generation dedicated to making this a better world.” 
—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

“Loewen’s candid and revealing descriptions of institutional racism in U.S. society and in textbooks are not presented to make students cynical or disempowered, but to help them acquire the knowledge, skills, and commitments needed to attain agency and to act to create a better world.”
—From the Series Foreword by James A. Banks, Director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Seattle; Past President of the the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)