James W. Loewen

Loewen died on August 19, 2021, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 79, and had been diagnosed with Stage IV bladder cancer two years prior to his death.

Rebecca Stefoff, known for her adaptation of Howard Zinn's bestseller A People's History of the United States for young readers, makes Lies My Teacher Told Me accessible for younger readers in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers Edition (2019).

In 2010, Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta co-wrote the book The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The Great Truth about the Lost Cause, an anthology containing a wide array of primary source documents pertaining to the Confederacy from the time of the American Civil War.

Loewen built on Lies My Teacher Told Me in Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History (Teachers College Press, 2009). The first four chapters lay out an argument for how history should be taught at the elementary and secondary levels, while chapters 5–10 address teaching specific issues in history.

Continuing his interest in racism in the United States, Loewen wrote Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, which was released in 2005. The book documents the histories of sundown towns, which are towns where African Americans, Jews, and other minority groups were forced (or strongly encouraged) to leave before sundown to avoid racist violence by the towns' white residents.

Loewen first taught in Mississippi at Tougaloo College, a historically black college founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War. For 20 years, Loewen taught about racism at the University of Vermont, where he was professor emeritus of sociology. Since 1997, he had been a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was selected for honoris causa membership in Omicron Delta Kappa in 1997 at SUNY Plattsburgh.

Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution, where he studied and compared 12 American history textbooks then widely used throughout the United States. He published his findings in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), which was republished in 2007 and 2018. He concluded that textbook authors propagate factually false, Eurocentric, and mythologized views of history. Loewen points out in the book that many of the distortions found in American history texts are "not even by the authors whose names grace the cover." In March 2012, the book's publisher, The New Press, listed Lies My Teacher Told Me as their top all-time bestseller. The book reflects Loewen's belief that history should not be taught as straightforward facts and dates to memorize, but rather as analysis of the context and root causes of events.

Loewen challenged the Board's decision in a lawsuit, Loewen v. Turnipseed (1980). Judge Orma R. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ruled that the rejection of the textbook was not based on "justifiable grounds", and that the authors were denied their right to free speech and press.

Loewen co-wrote a Mississippi history textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change (1974), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Nonfiction in 1975. The book was rejected for use in Mississippi's public schools by the Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board on the grounds that it was too controversial and placed too much focus on racial matters.

Loewen married his first wife, Patricia Hanrahan, in 1968. Together, they had two children. They divorced in 1975. He married his second wife, Susan Robertson, in 2006. They remained married until his death.

Loewen attended Carleton College. In 1963, as a junior, he spent a semester in Mississippi, an experience in a different culture that led him to question what he had been taught about United States history. He was intrigued by learning about the unique place of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Mississippi culture, commonly thought of as biracial. Loewen went on to earn a PhD in sociology from Harvard University based on his research on Chinese Americans in Mississippi.

James William Loewen (February 6, 1942 – August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

Loewen was born in Decatur, Illinois, on February 6, 1942. His father, David, was a medical director and physician from an immigrant Mennonite community; his mother, Winifred (Gore), was a librarian and teacher. Loewen was raised in Decatur, where he attended MacArthur High School and was a National Merit Scholar as a graduate in 1960.