Loewen, James W.

James William Loewen (February 6, 1942August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, '' Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong''.

Early life

Loewen was born in Decatur, Illinois, on February 6, 1942. His father, David, was a medical director and physician from an immigrant Mennonite community; his mother, Winifred (Gore), was a librarian and teacher. Loewen was raised in Decatur, where he attended MacArthur High School and was a National Merit Scholar as a graduate in 1960.

Loewen attended Carleton College. In 1963, as a junior, he spent a semester in Mississippi, an experience in a different culture that led him to question what he had been taught about United States history. He was intrigued by learning about the unique place of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Mississippi culture, commonly thought of as biracial. Loewen went on to earn a PhD in sociology from Harvard University based on his research on Chinese Americans in Mississippi.

Career

Loewen first taught in Mississippi at Tougaloo College, a historically black collegeCheney, Matt
"Biography of James W. Loewen"
University of Illinois. Retrieved October 16, 2010. founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War. For 20 years, Loewen taught about racism at the University of Vermont, where he was professor ''emeritus'' of sociology. Since 1997, he had been a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was selected for ''honoris causa'' membership in Omicron Delta Kappa in 1997 at SUNY Plattsburgh.

First Amendment battle

Loewen co-wrote a Mississippi history textbook, '' Mississippi: Conflict and Change'' (1974), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Nonfiction in 1975. The book was rejected for use in Mississippi's public schools by the Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board on the grounds that it was too controversial and placed too much focus on racial matters.

Loewen challenged the Board's decision in a lawsuit, '' Loewen v. Turnipseed'' (1980). Judge Orma R. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ruled that the rejection of the textbook was not based on "justifiable grounds", and that the authors were denied their right to free speech and press.

The American Library Association considers ''Loewen v. Turnipseed'', 488 F. Supp. 1138 ( N.D. Miss. 1980), a historic First Amendment case and one of the foundations of the "right to read freely."

''Lies My Teacher Told Me''

Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution, where he studied and compared 12 American history textbooks then widely used throughout the United States. He published his findings in '' Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong'' (1995), which was republished in 2007 and 2018. He concluded that textbook authors propagate factually false, Eurocentric, and mythologized views of history. Loewen points out in the book that many of the distortions found in American history texts are "not even by the authors whose names grace the cover." In March 2012, the book's publisher, The New Press

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