James W. Loewen

James W. Loewen ( born February 6, 1942 in Decatur, Illinois) is an American sociologist and author. He concentrates on racial conflict in the United States, he taught for two decades as a professor at the University of Vermont.

Life

Loewen was born in 1942 as son of Dr. David F. and Winifred Loewen. His father was a medical director and his mother a librarian and teacher. He grew up in Decatur on in Illinois and received in his senior year at MacArthur High School in 1960, a scholarship as a National Merit Scholar. He studied at Carleton College in 1968 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University. In his early studies in Carlton in 1963, he spent a semester at Mississippi State University in Mississippi, which established largely imparted to him his doubts about the history of the United States.

Loewen taught from 1968 to 1975, first at the originally mainly of colored Americans visited Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He moved in 1975 to the University of Vermont, where he remained until his retirement in 1997 on relations between the races ( Race Relations ) taught more than twenty years. Since 1997 he has been a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America.

Appreciation

He is known for his work " Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong ," which was the result of two years of research at the Smithsonian Institute. He compared the content of twelve history textbooks, which are widely used in the U.S. schools. He felt not only current failings, but also noted that a controversial depiction of the past is largely absent: There are almost exclusively present events and dates, but hardly the context and underlying causes of the events. Loewen is recommended in the book, among other things, that teachers should use two books - the student should eyes be opened for contradictions; and the motivation for the different version of events should be explored.

Publications

  • The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, Social Science in the Courtroom, and The Truth About Columbus Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, ISBN 0-674-57660-8; second edition, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88133-312-3
  • Mississippi: Conflict and Change ( co-authored with Charles Sallis ), New York: Pantheon Books, 1974, ISBN 0-394-48964-0
  • Social Science in the Courtroom, Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1982, ISBN 0-669-04310-9
  • Lies My Teacher Told Me | Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: The New Press, 1995, ISBN 1-56584 100 X; Simon and Schuster, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81886-8
  • Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong, New York: The New Press, 1999, ISBN 1-56584-344-4
  • Sundown Towns, New York: The New Press, 2005, ISBN 1 - 56584-887 X -
Decatur (Illinois)
429131
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