Air Date: 042205
Subject: James W. Loewen: Everything You Know is Wrong
Books: Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong & Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong & Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
Guest: James W. Loewen
Summary: James Loewen, author of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, talks about distortions, errors and outright falsehoods to be found at many Civil War sites.
Brett’s Summary: James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America, spends a fascinating hour talking about how historic sites and history textbooks get history wrong. I had to laugh when he mentioned the most common first name of a high school history teacher is ‘Coach’. Sadly, he’s correct. In thinking back to my own high school education, all of my history classes were taught by coaches, mainly basketball and football coaches. Even my AP U.S. history course was taught by a baseball coach, who happened to buck the trend a bit and was a very good teacher. Loewen refers to the period from 1890-1940 as the “nadir” of race relations in this country. He goes on to discuss the ways in which the former Confederacy “won” the Civil War by about 1890. D.W. Griffith’s epic Civil War film The Birth of a Nation displayed blatant racism even though it was a mainstream film at the time of its release in 1915. Some of the historical markers highlighted include South Carolina monuments at Gettysburg promoting States’ Rights as the cause of the war without any mention of slavery. This is in direct opposition to South Carolina’s secession ordinance, says Loewen, which prominently mentions slavery. He goes on to describe the almost comical history of “Lincoln’s birth cabin” in Kentucky, which at one point was literally combined with “Jefferson Davis’ birth cabin” after both were shipped to a fair. The next portion of the show involves the underlying issues with history textbooks and the encouragement of sloth when teaching the subject. He believes these textbooks and tests are aimed at coaches who know they were hired to win games rather than teach history. The result, says Loewen, is that history/social studies are typically the least favorite class among high school students, requiring rote memorization of the “correct” answer. The last portion of the interview involves Loewen’s new book on “Sundown Towns”, those all white towns throughout the country (especially the Midwest, including my home state of Illinois) who actually had signs posted telling African-Americans they were not welcome in that town or county after sundown. These towns sometimes used violence to enforce these laws. Loewen originally hails from Decatur, Illinois, not too far north of me, and he was shocked to discover nearly ALL of the small towns around Decatur had been sundown towns at one point or another.
Civil War Talk Radio airs most Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on World Talk Radio Studio A. Host Gerry Prokopowicz, the History Chair at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, interviews a guest each week and discusses their interest in the Civil War. Most interviews center around a book or books if the guest is an author. Other guests over the years have included public Historians such as park rangers and museum curators,wargamers, bloggers, and even a member of an American Civil War Round Table located in London, England.
In this series of blog entries, I will be posting air dates, subjects, and guests, and if I have time, I’ll provide a brief summary of the program. You can find all of the past episodes I’ve entered into the blog by clicking on the Civil War Talk Radio category. Each program should appear either on or near the date it was first broadcast.
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