James W. Loewen

James William Loewen (born February 6, 1942 in Decatur , Illinois , † August 19, 2021 in Bethesda , Maryland ) was an American sociologist and author. His area of ​​work was racial conflict in the United States. Loewen taught for two decades as a professor at the University of Vermont .

Life

Loewen was born in 1942 as the son of Dr. David F. and Winifred Loewen were born. His father was a medical director and his mother a librarian and teacher. He grew up in the town where he was born and was awarded a National Merit Scholar scholarship in his senior year of MacArthur High School in 1960 . He graduated from Carleton College and received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University . In his early years at Carlton, he spent a semester at Mississippi State University in Mississippi in 1963 , which was one of the main reasons for his doubts about the history of the United States conveyed to him .

Loewen taught from 1968 to 1975 at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, which was originally attended primarily by black Americans . He moved to the University of Vermont in 1975 , where he taught race relations for more than twenty years until his retirement in 1997. From 1997 he held a visiting professorship in sociology at the Catholic University of America . He was a member of the American Sociological Association . Loewen died in August 2021 at the age of 79.

Appreciation

Loewen was best 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 contents of twelve history textbooks that are widely used in US schools. He not only tracked down current omissions, but also noticed that a controversial description of the past is largely missing: almost only events and dates are presented, but hardly the context and the underlying causes of the events. In the book, Loewen recommends, among other things, that teachers should use two books - the pupil's eyes should be opened to contradictions and the motivation for the different portrayals 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: DC Heath and Company, 1982, ISBN 0-669-04310-9 .
• Read 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 .
• Read 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 .

Web links

• Literature by and about James W. Loewen in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• James W. Loewen: Official website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hillel Italy: James W. Loewen, wrote 'Read My Teacher Told Me,' dead at 79. In: apnews.com. August 21, 2021, accessed August 21, 2021 .