Quotes from James W. Loewen

In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship -- at least formally -- until the 1890s.

The Civil War had been about something other than states' rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

He ended his description of them with these menacing words: "I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.

We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

A patriot is one who loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who scorns the homelands of others. —JOHANNES RAU

Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit -- hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.

repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people

Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures.

When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them, and—eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies. —RICHARD M. NIXON

Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy part. After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can acknowledge its evils. Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery's enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.

This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in America history happened anonymously.

The victors of the Civil War executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandant of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders and other Unionists, white and black.

To end our segregated neighborhoods and towns requires a leap of the imagination: Americans have to understand that white racism is still a problem in the United States. This isn't always easy. Most white Americans do not see racism as a problem in their neighborhood. We need to know about sundown towns to know what to do about them.

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. —ANATOLE FRANCE

Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America.

The Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of Europeans and Africans. They were a triracial isolate composed of Creek Indians, remnants of smaller tribes, runaway slaves, and whites who preferred to live in Indian society. The word Seminole is itself a corruption of the Spanish cimarrón (altered to maroons on Jamaica), a word that came to mean runaway slaves.

Saving the Union had never been Lincoln's sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve the Union by preserving slavery forever.

Other lakes get similar treatment. According to Michigan markers, whites discovered Lake Michigan, Lake St. Clair, and Lake Superior. Lake Erie gets a more complex marker: "Named for the Erie Indians, this was the last of the Great Lakes discovered by white men..." Actually, none of them was discovered by white men, but this marker at least admits that Native Americans existed and implies they knew of Lake Erie.

Ironically, societies characterized by a complex division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized armies. Precisely these "civilized" societies are likely to resort to savage violence in their attempts to conquer "primitive" societies.22

The authors make no connection between the failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

Words are important—they can influence, and in some cases rationalize, policy.

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