History Is Wrong

History Is Wrong PDF

Author: Erich von Däniken

Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1601630867

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The author takes a look at the Voynich manuscript, the Book of Enoch, a lost subterranean labyrinth in Ecuador, and the mysterious lines in the desert of Nazca.

How History Gets Things Wrong

How History Gets Things Wrong PDF

Author: Alex Rosenberg

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0262537990

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Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me PDF

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1595583262

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Criticizes the way history is presented in current textbooks, and suggests a more accurate approach to teaching American history.

Bad History

Bad History PDF

Author: Emma Marriott

Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1843177773

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So many historical 'truths' handed down by teachers or historians, and repeated by the press, prove on closer scrutiny to be at best misleading, and at worst deliberately falsified. Yet they are often so deeply rooted that we take them as fact - America's Founding Fathers must have been democrats, surely, and wasn't Captain Scott 'of the Antarctic' one of history's greatest leaders? Some historical 'facts' are little more than fables, distorted in the retelling; others are the result of deliberate attempts to mislead, or to cover up a discreditable past. Entertaining but authoritative, Bad History debunks a wealth of historical errors, accidental or deliberate. In doing so, it exposes many falsehoods that have wrongly - and sometimes dangerously - influenced our understanding of the world's history.

They Got It Wrong: History

They Got It Wrong: History PDF

Author: Emma Marriott

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-03-21

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1621450228

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They Got It Wrong: History exposes historical fallacies around the globe from the Roman Empire to World War II. There are countless twisted, sanitized tales that have become entrenched in popular belief but are really now more than warped reflections of the truth—or flat out lies. Author Emma Marriot shines a light on these murky corners of history to separate out the facts from shadowy fictions and illuminate how and why these falsehoods got passed around as truths.

Teaching What Really Happened

Teaching What Really Happened PDF

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2018-09-07

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0807759481

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“Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country.”— Howard Zinn James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled "Truth" that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery. Book Features: An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education. Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography. Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened. Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in today’s schools.

History's Greatest Lies

History's Greatest Lies PDF

Author: William Weir

Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 161673437X

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Get the real facts you weren’t taught in school and learn how these myths have survived for so long. Discover the stories behind history’s greatest lies and how—and why—the world’s biggest whoppers have survived textbooks and lesson plans for years. For instance, did you know the conquistador Hernán Cortés wasn’t as bloodthirsty as they say? Neither were the Goths, who were actually the most progressive of the Germanic tribes. Or, that a petty criminal with a resemblance to John Dillinger was probably assassinated instead of the notorious bank robber? In History’s Greatest Lies, Weir sets the record straight through a fascinating examination of historical lies and myths and the true stories behind them. Each chapter pinpoints a misconception held as common truth in history. For example: Emperor Nero did not fiddle as Rome burned Paul Revere had plenty of help in his midnight ride In terms of prisons, the Bastille wasn’t all that bad Weir explains why each lie persevered in our minds through ulterior motives, responsibility shirking, or exaggerations. You’ll also discover the common threads that make up these falsehoods: the scapegoats, the spin needed to cast undeserving in a better light, and the frightful oversimplification of facts. Praise for History’s Greatest Lies “Weir takes no prisoners—and tells no lies—in his continuously surprising and always fascinating new book. Great falsehoods have shaped history even more than great truths; the enduring fascination of this highly original volume is discovering how much of what we accept for fact is just plain wrong.” —Joe Cummins, author of The War Chronicles: From Chariots to Flintlocks and History’s Greatest Untold Stories

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me PDF

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 162097455X

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"Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself." —Howard Zinn A new edition of the national bestseller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important—and successful—history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times. For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be "objective." What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls "an extremely convincing plea for truth in education." In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should—and could—be taught to American students.

Lies My Teacher Told Me about Christopher Columbus

Lies My Teacher Told Me about Christopher Columbus PDF

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781595589859

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Some myths don't die, and lies are still being told about Christopher Columbus: that he 'discovered' the Americas, that the land was sparsely populated by native people, that those people were primitive and that they submitted to Columbus's 'God-like' authority. Loewen disproves the myths about Columbus still enshrined in American textbooks with quotations from primary source material that sets the record straight. The poster and accompanying 48-page paperback book sum up the mistellings - and reveal the real story - in a graphically appealing and accessible format.

Lies Across America

Lies Across America PDF

Author: James W. Loewen

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1620974932

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A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called "jim-dandy pop history," by the bestselling, American Book Award–winning author "The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history." —Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans From the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated—and more timely than ever—version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America. In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include: • a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons' uprising • a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia • the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.