Lies my teacher told me : everything your American history textbook got wrong

Review

This was written as an assessment of a dozen or so popular high school history textbooks.  The focus is on major American historical events or periods that are either omitted from these textbooks or just plain wrong in the textbooks’ descriptions.  I found several examples to be completely eye-opening (my teachers must have been “lying” to me, too).  For example, though Columbus’s voyage to the New World is touted in all of the books, only a few of the textbooks mentioned the damage done to the native Hispaniola population by their “discovery.”  Helen Keller’s early life is featured in most of the textbooks, yet her influence as an adult crusading for human rights and her membership in the Socialist Party is completely glossed over.  Another result of this critique is the bias found in the majority (if not all) of the textbooks.