Historical Inaccuracies

After reading this chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me, the reader finds out information that is shocking and completely different compared to what they have been taught. Not to mention it makes sense. Ideas have either been falsified or twisted into something that is not entirely true. History textbooks really do leave out the information or give the wrong information, that could really make history more enjoyable and interesting for its

Although many historical filmmakers alter some events and use fiction as a tool in providing an accurate historical representation, the makers of “The

     However, to often in Hollywood the city of glamour and glitz, fortune and fame, movie producers have a tendency and even feel at liberty to rewrite American history. In my opinion this is all done out of greed. The movie industry, is all about money, therefore producers are obligated to do whatever it takes to keep it rolling into theatre box offices across the country. Producers know that people

High school history textbooks are seen, by students, as presenting the last word on American History. Rarely, if ever, do they question what their text tells them about our collective past. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, they should be. Loewen has spent considerable time and effort reviewing history texts that were written for high school students. In Lies, he has reviewed twenty texts and has compared them to the actual history. Sadly, not one text measures up to the author's expectation of teaching students to think. What is worse, though, is that students come away from their classes without "having developed the ability to think coherently about social

As the professor James W Loewer, author of the book, referred that Americans have lost touch with their history. Our teachers and textbooks play important roles in our history study. However, it is their eliding and misrepresenting factoids that have been obstacles in our history studying. Because access to too much errors and distortion, many Americans can hardly understand the past of the country. As a result, we lack the ability to reflect on what’s going on right now and in the future.

Loewen states that textbooks “devote forty-nine pages to the 1930s and forty-seven pages to the 1940s, but few than twenty to the 1980s and 1990s (even tossing the first few years of the millennium) …” (Loewen 260). This allows for history of the past to be more accurate of that than the future because of the controversies that arise. Although it may be good to get a clear picture of what happened in the past, information may be withheld for more recent events and the truth of these issues could be told later to future generations. This is interesting because there may be more intelligence for example on 9/11 that we do not know and will be publicized later. So, all the facts may not be as clear as they would be in the future. A key point that I found very interesting was that history becomes more accurate through the passing of time. Knowing this, is a very important perspective to have and look at recent event today with this in

I decided to pick the chapter that stood out to me the most, chapter 2 Women and Gender on Plantations and in Factories, by Stephen L. Harp. I have always been interested in systems gender inequalities and how they were perpetuated and changed over time, so I thought that this was a very interesting chapter. Harp decided to make his point by reference a film, Indochine, throughout his argument and talked about the inaccuracies and the characters in the film, comparing them to the actual events and right facts of the time.

“History is dictated by the victors” (Churchill). No victor in a war will criticize the actions they took during the war or justify their enemies actions, condemning their enemy in the history books. After the war is won the politicians decree how the events are told. With no one to oppose the legislators write the history books from their own perspective, shaping the minds of everyone who reads history books. Victors of conflict dictate how history is molded, because as winners of war they are the policy makers with political influence.

The authors believe that the view that “history is what happened in the past” is a “profoundly misleading” view of history because new interpretations and new information can be presented which can alter our perspective on the course of history. I agree with the author’s view because history is being made everyday and history is constantly changing. According to the article it states, “But historians are said to succeed if they bring back the facts without distorting them or forcing a new perspective on them.” ( Davidson, pg1) This shows that viewing history as what happened in the past doesn’t have to be a misleading view of history if information and facts weren’t altered.

Film is one of the historian's most effective teaching tools. O’Connor hypothesized that “within ten years all students would learn their history lessons by watching movies rather than by reading a book.” Films may be captivating, but true information should be obtained from primary documents. Primary documents can provide vivid cultural and social backgrounds that cannot be obtained through readings and lectures. Motion pictures can make powerful arguments about historical interpretation promoting beneficial classroom debates. Today’s population is more accustomed to visually based information rather than written documents because they find historical documents difficult to interpret. .

The concept of “history repeating itself” is relatively cliché by definition; however, it is substantiated by the common themes found throughout human civilization: war, love, family, and the like. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a novel about six generations of the Buendía family, is able to reflect this concept in a similar manner through a nonlinear timeline. However, historical recurrences are often taken for granted, and their causes are not fully explored. Understanding why so many events, particularly mistakes, visibly repeat throughout humanity’s collective past is valuable to society, helping to prevent mistakes that could hypothetically be extremely dangerous, even fatal.

In a recent letter to a local newspaper titled “Dream defiled,” a writer warned Americans not to vote Obama into the office of president. The writer made two errors concerning Africa and the slave trade. He wrote: “During this time in a country called Africa, a land of tribal warfare and poverty, its people were selling their children into slavery to the slave traders.”

Making mistakes is natural, and it helps educate those willing to learn from those mistakes. Good executives make mistakes every week, but what makes them the best is how they learn from those mistakes. Mr. Konrad is one of those successful executives. He acknowledged the mistakes he made as a young businessman, which lead to the success of IKEA. Mr. Konrad once stated, “Only those who sleep make no mistakes” (2011, pg 63). This quote introduced at the beginning of the chapter helps show no one in the world is capable of being perfect, even if your Mr. Konrad who is a very successful businessman.

Sources are essential when investigating events of the past. However, narrative texts are forces to be reckoned with, in constructing our own memories pertaining to history. We can be trained to analyze every last drop of a source if we are so driven, but the moment it starts to pull at our heartstrings, we may not be so bold. Instead, we often treat narrative texts as binoculars into the past, guiding our educational journey. Doubts of credibility or accuracy are given backseat status, as these sources tap into our empathetic human nature. We automatically put ourselves directly into the story, in the perspective of the protagonist as determined by the source, and consequently any future opinion of this event will be affected

Robert Rosenstone, a professor of California Institute of Technology, has written many different genres from history, fiction, poetry, etc., has said, “historical film has been making its impact upon us for many years now, and its time that we began to take it seriously. By this I mean we must begin to look at film, …” (p. 1). According to Rosenstone, historians have been able to adapt to the new style of learning within classrooms. Whether it be the inability of some teachers to teach