97 Quotes by James W. Loewen

The first requirement of a slave society is secure borders. 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. Indeed, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism.

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

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.

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

Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.

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.

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.

Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future.