Quotes from James W. Loewen

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain.55 Only seven or eight arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville.

If textbooks recognized Lincoln's racism, students would learn that racism not only affects Ku Klux Klan extremists but has been normal throughout our history. And as they watched Lincoln struggle with himself to apply America's democratic principles across the color line, students would see how ideas can develop and a person can grow.

Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 million to 74 million as 83% of the nation's population growth took place in the suburbs.

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History Social Science in the Courtroom

Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United States, however, they are tricky subjects for historians. As Edward Carr notes, History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not what people failed to do. On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent on the actions of people.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.

Publishers or those who influence them have evidently concluded that what American society needs to stay strong is citizens who assent to its social structure and economic system without thought.

Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even

By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking the government's side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship.

The Truth can set us free.

It is not too much to say that the blacks in Georgia and the Carolinas made Sherman's march possible. Their help meant that Sherman's forces would not be traveling through hostile territory without supply lines. Rather, the soldiers were more like a huge guerilla force in friendly territory.

Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city's first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage in DWB ("Driving While Black") policing, targeting black motorists for minor infractions like failing to signal turns.

Native Americans also insist that "squaw" is a derogatory term. Some believe it derives from a French corruption of an Iroquois epithet for vagina, analogous to "cunt" in English. Others believe it meant "bitch" in Algonquian dialects spoken in Virginia.

history textbooks need to disabuse students of the flat-earth myth.

Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as "critical theory."16 Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people."17 Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.

After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous "front porch campaign" from his family home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene of an ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. According to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, "As a consequence, Marion is an overwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002].

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.

As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once.

White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so. -Josh Billings