Quotes from James W. Loewen

Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us.

Although each of us comes into the world de novo, we are not really new creatures. We arrive into a social slot, born not only to a family but also a religion, community, and, of course, a nation and a culture.

Those few textbooks that do discuss Wilson's racism and other shortcomings have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

History is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown how race prompted the sweeping political realignment of 1964–72, in which the white South went from a Democratic bastion to a Republican stronghold.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning.

Mrs. Berch, who witnessed the shooting, said she thought she recognized the man who killed her husband, but authorities Tuesday said they had no clews as to the identify of the members of the mob. They were not masked.

We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that.

No sensible Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of Columbus."90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

For that matter, even if the owners and workers in a historic site had not included a president, most visitors would want to hear about the important events in their lives, not just about their furniture.

As Ellis Cose famously raged: I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being?

How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness.

neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. 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.

Any telling of history requires choices as to what is included and what is left out and is therefore by definition an interpretation.

The next successful Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, deliberately chose a citadel of white supremacy -- the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi -- as the kickoff site for his presidential campaign, where he declared his support for states rights, code words signaling that the federal government should leave local jurisdictions to handle the race problem as they see fit.

I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. . . . Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.40

As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth.

In the 1920s, Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring "Securing a Correct History of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the Confederacy.

For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination

Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Triumph of the Molecule.

Are you going to tell kids that Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in Jesus? Not me!' a textbook editor exclaimed to me.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.15

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant."42