Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me (Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula)

A college professor debunks the myths that have infiltrated America's school curricula.

In 1995, James W. Loewen penned the classic work of criticism Lies My Teacher Told Me, a left-leaning corrective that addressed much of what was sanitized and omitted from American history books.

But in the decades that followed, false leftist narratives—as wrong as those they supplanted—have come to dominate American academia and education. Now, in the same spirit but updated for 2024, Wilfred Reilly demolishes the scholastic myths propagated by the left, uncovers fresh angles on “established” events, and turns what we think we know about history upside down. Among the popular lies he debunks:

• “The ‘Red Scare’ was a moral panic that caught no commies”
• “Native Americans were peaceful people who spent all day dancing”
• “European colonialism was—empirically—a no-good, terrible, very bad thing”
• “The racist ‘Southern Strategy’ turned the South Republican”
• “The Vietnam War was unpopular and pointless”

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me sets the record straight on many of these myths, explaining that there actually were communists in Hollywood; that many Native American tribes were cannibals, owned slaves and made them march the Trail of Tears with them; and that history, while almost always bad for Black Americans, was much worse for all of us than we tend to think it was. 

Smart, irreverent, and deeply researched, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me will revolutionize your understanding of history and reveal a new and refreshing way to teach and think about the past.