What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.
–James Baldwin, as quoted by James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me
Columbus Day comment from FunMunch.com
http://comments.funmunch.com/columbus-day-comment-2234.html
I’ve been compiling a list of the most important books I’ve read in my life. Right now I have seven, and they are not what I was expecting them to be. Only one is a humanities text, and an iconoclastic one at that. I’m talking about Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. This book blew the top of my head off. Finally I understood why history class was so tedious, despite loving social studies as a younger child. (Partly due to this book, I later went on to work at a local historical society, to this day my favorite job!)
Loewen ripped the standard American high school history textbooks to shreds, exposing them as the vacuous drivel they were. Even now, thinking about his telling of the Columbus story shocks me, not only because of the Mel Gibson level of atrociousness and violence, but because I had never heard about it before. It was truly a hero’s fall from grace.
The most striking point Loewen made, judging by what I most remember fifteen years after reading it, was the way American history texts were written not as fact or analysis of events, but rather as creation myths. This wild country, cobbled together from so many cultures, needed a common creation myth. It needed this because all cultures need them. And since we are in theory a secular state, it couldn’t be a religious creation myth. Instead we wound up deifying historical figures, making heroes out of the cruel but influential, mythologizing the birth of the American state.
My point is this: if we don’t acknowledge the critical importance of myth to our collective psyche, we will be at the mercy of its disguised presence.
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Click here for some excerpts: http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/lieshist.htm
James W. Loewen’s website: http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/liesmyteachertoldme.php
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What are some of your thoughts on Columbus Day, and does the theory of history as myth shed light on your emotional response to it?
Mysterious Artemis 
I too am a fan of “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” As soon as I read the Columbus truths I started my own mini-campaign of trying to get rid of Columbus Day as a holiday. I wrote a letter to my congressman suggesting that the day be replaced by a more American reason to take the day off, and I’ve called into radio shows to spread the education. Someone once told me that the holiday is important to Italian Americans so it may be a tough call politically for anyone to champion dissolving it.
If you’re interested in the quirky untold parts of American history I would love to have you check out my blog: lynngarthwaiteblog.com My focus is on the reason our states have their odd shapes (boot heels, panhandles, bumps and funny angles). I can’t count the number of times I’ve slapped my head during my research saying “I didn’t know that – how cool!”