Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History

About this book

In this follow-up to his landmark bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Loewen once again takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of todays multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just got plain wrong). How did people get here? Why did Europe win? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated social studies course to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about Americas past. Calling for a new way to teach history, this book will help teachers move beyond traditional textbooks to tackle difficult but important topics like conflicts with Native Americans, slavery, and racial oppression. Throughout, Loewen shows time and again how teaching what really happened not only connects better with all kinds of students, it better prepares those students to be tomorrows citizens.