James W. Loewen Quotes

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight.

Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

Conclusions are not always pleasant.

There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.

Many Americans have never owned a book, and I'm not talking about because of the recent digital revolution. I'm talking about before there even was a digital revolution.

We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

I'm looking forward to the future, which is a good thing, because it's coming.

The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don't read.

All of the common core standards stuff about critical reading and critical thinking and so on can only be positive.

Textbooks are written in an oracular monotone, so that they claim to be true and important.

Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the west.

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time.

The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.

I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the people who did not write them; so it's a new definition of "author."

There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline.

I don't think teachers read the textbooks. And I don't think adoption committees read the textbooks before they adopt them. I think they look at them.

It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit.

Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual

Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook.

History can be a weapon, and it can be used against you.