Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen

This was amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. It's entertaining, despite the fact that it's nonfiction, it's well-written, it's full of interesting facts, and it's utterly germane to anyone who's ever gone to high school in America. It made me think long and hard about lots of things, which I'll probably only briefly touch on here, along with the quotes that inspired the thought. (I'll also post some random facts that I learned. He includes some fascinating info.)

1. Some people think Columbus was Jewish, and a recent convert to Christianity. Awesome.

2. Reasons the Indians were so susceptible to European diseases: 1. they had no diseases with them, for the cold weather while crossing from Siberia killed all the germs, 2. they didn't have any large livestock (sheep, pigs, horses, cows, goats) that could transmit diseases, 3. the social density of their societies wasn't high enough to transmit diseases, 4. they practiced basic hygeine. (Squanto tried to teach the Pilgrims to bathe, but failed.)

3. In 1617, a disease (currently unknown, possibly the chicken pox or bubonic plague) brought by English fishermen wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the Indian population of coastal New England. That is why the Pilgrims arrived to find lands cleared but no people farming them, and that's the only possible reason the Pilgrims could have survived--the "wilderness" what not actually a wilderness, but a highly cultivated area that had been recently depopulated. (Not virgin land, but a widowed land, as Loewen puts it.) Early Europeans arrived in some Indian towns to find that 950 of 1000 inhabitants had died, with their corpses still lying in the streets, with no one left to bury them.

4. Squanto, having been captured by Englishmen a few years before and sent to England as a slave, already spoke English when the Pilgrims arrived. Talk about the original "no need to study a foreign language since everyone speaks English anyway"!

5. Whites captured by Indians often had to be bound hand and foot and forced to return to white society; Indians captured by whites never had to be asked twice if they wanted to return. Embarrassing.

6. The Founding Fathers took a lot of their inspiration from the Iroquois League, including the American logo of the eagle clutching arrows. Too bad no credit is ever given.

7. An outsider's description of Christianity: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they belived strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died." Sounds pretty silly when put that way, huh?

8. "King Philip's War cost more American lives in combat, Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the Spanish-American War. In proportion to population, casualties were greater than in any other American war." (111) Yet, who's heard of this war?

9. My impression is that the real problem with these history textbooks is that they are viewing history as an unbroken line of progress--from the past to the future, we just keep getting better! History isn't like that. We were different in the past, but not worse, and we're different now, but not better. That's all. Plus, this style of thinking leads one to believe that things "had" to be that way, which in turns gives us a completely simplified and uninteresting view of history. (Hence, the problem of the textbooks.)

10. "The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor." (199) This is why I vote Democrat. (Or, when I get a chance, Socialist.)

11. Educated people were more likely to support the Vietnam War--instead of education making people more tolerant and peace-mongering, it makes them more likely to support the system, having been thoroughly indoctrinated into it. Just a little bit of food for thought.