Textbook Analysis

How could a textbook have it wrong? How could the information all students learned be missing key information and not even reflect the reality of most historical events? Throughout this class we have been asked to question and challenge the way history has been told and to challenge everything that has been told to us for so many years. This course accomplished that thought process for me and made me look at information given to me in a different way. Speaking from a high school perspective, most previous teachers had believed exactly what the textbook had said and didn’t question it at all as they went teaching from chapter to chapter, and having us to repetitive book work to memorize terms. Throughout the book we were given to read, “Lies …show more content…
Before the specifics of the chapter is discussed, there needs to be a reasoning as to why this information was “forgotten” throughout time or simply just not discussed. This relates back to the idea of historical memory, which is how people recall events of the past. In chapter nine, Loewen is evidently hinting to the fact that in classrooms in America, lots of important and true information was missing due to the fact that certain parts of the war and America’s actions make America look in the wrong. An example of this is said by Loewen when he writes the quotation by John Kerry speaking of the My Lai massacre during Vietnam, saying “how American troops ‘had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads... cut off limbs ..randomly shot civilians(pg. 250)”. These acts had occurred during the Vietnam war and when the war was talked about in later years in textbooks, and some textbooks didn’t go this graphic or say anything about it and others didn’t mention Americans like this doing such things to …show more content…
It’s so different how a college professor is because I think that Dr. Abreu highlighted some different aspects of history that I had never learned before, which is different than seeing the same events that I have learned about for years. Our themes throughout the course have been historical memory and historical agency, which I have never heard of before the class, and it just opened up to me realizing to question things that are told to you and to try and understand why things happened the way they did, rather than just take someone’s (or a textbook’s) word for it. This course and this book allowed me to view events in our history differently and gave me some insight into how I have learned things and the way to look at information given to me in the