When books lie
On James W. Loewen and the cultivation of informed skepticism.
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, I was given a copy of James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. It’s a look at the shortcomings of about a dozen widely used history textbooks and an argument for changing the way we teach history to young Americans.
Loewen inveighs against the bowdlerization of history, the smoothing out of rough edges that presents American students with simplified tales of heroism and virtue while ignoring the messier and less straightforward aspects of our shared heritage. This approach, he says, fails to teach students how to think critically and enable them to think beyond the text to question how facts are employed, see how historical narratives are manufactured, and consider what might be being left out of what’s being presented.
Early in the book, he lays out some “mildly subversive” questions that he encourages readers to consider when consuming history. Here are a few of them:
When and where did the author live?
For what purpose did [they] write? What audience did [they] have in mind?
What was the author’s social class? Age? Race? Sex?
What was [their] ideology?
The questions, writes Loewen, “suggest readers should not only examine what an author wrote, but also why.” He says that “When confronting a claim about the distant past or a statement about what happened yesterday, students—indeed, all Americans—need to develop informed skepticism, not nihilistic cynicism.”
Informed skepticism. Almost 30 years after I first read this book, that phrase sticks out to me. I think if I had to sum up my approach to criticism, maybe to life in general, that would be how I’d do it: Informed skepticism. As a kid, history was my favorite subject, so to learn that there was more to it, things that were being omitted or glossed over, was fascinating.
Loewen spends much of the book highlighting areas where textbook publishers have made omissions, often because telling the whole story might endanger their ability to sell their textbooks in certain parts of the country. He writes about Woodrow Wilson’s racism, Helen Keller’s radical socialism, and the crimes of Christopher Columbus.
Back in the 1990s at least, the Columbus material was still somewhat controversial. I know that a lot of this has changed since then; my nine-year-old daughter has brought home some very straightforward materials about Columbus’s misdeeds, things that I wasn’t really fully aware of until I read Bartolomé de las Casas in college. On the flip side, kids today seem to believe that Helen Keller actually didn’t exist at all, so perhaps it’s a wash.
What I took from Lies My Teacher Told Me was that books can lie, either by commission or omission, and that it’s incumbent upon me to approach everything I read with a critical eye, to understand what the author is trying to make me think, feel, and believe and what their motives are. It’s a somewhat adversarial posture—and you can see it in my review of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that I loved and was profoundly moved by, all the while realizing that Williams was manipulating me into having empathy for a character who was, all things considered, pretty awful.
This lesson is at the core of my being, and in the years since I’d read Lies My Teacher Told Me, I’ve often thought about how I would pass that lesson on to my own child. I’ve been waiting for the day when she turns 12 or 13 when I can pass the book onto her in the hopes that she draws a similar lesson from it. And with that in mind, I decided recently to check Loewen’s book out of the library and reread it myself, after 30 years, to reacquaint myself with it, with an eye toward future discussions with my daughter.
I looked forward to revisiting it, expecting to find much to take solace in, especially in these difficult times. Instead, I was surprised to find that the book contained precisely the kind of poorly supported false facts it warns against.
In a chapter about the “discovery” of the New World, Loewen says that there is still much debate over what constitutes the first contact between Europeans and indigenous American populations. As part of that passage, he drops this, rather nonchalantly:
Two American Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 BC became major curiosities in Europe.
At first glance, this seemed obviously false. Were it true, it would certainly have warranted more than a single sentence, no?
As an informed, skeptical reader, I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So I followed Loewen’s footnotes. And unfortunately, there’s hardly any evidence of this, let alone extraordinary evidence. It appears to be a misreading (or optimistic distortion) of Pliny by Jack Forbes, who Loewen cites. From Forbes:
Returning to the Atlantic, it is interesting to note that there is some additional evidence to support the notion that Americans crossed in an easterly direction. For example, Pliny, in his Natural History, reported that:
Nepos de septentrionali circuitu tradit Quinto Metello Celeri, Afrani in consulatu collegae sed tum Galliae proconsuli, Indos a rege Sueborum dono datos, que ex India commerci causa navigantes tempestatibus essent in Germaniam abrepti.
…
that Quintus Metellus Celer, colleague of Afranius in the consulship [of Rome] but at the time proconsul of Gaul [south of the Alps] received from the [Suevi] king … a present of Indians, who on a trade voyage had been carried off their course by storms to Germany.
…
Also Pliny believed that the Indos had reached a Germanic-speaking zone by way of a fictitious sea which was thought by him to have connected India with the Baltic. We know, however, that the only way that people looking like ‘Indians’ could have been driven by a storm to northern Europe would have been across the Atlantic from America.
I can think of a few simpler ways that someone who looked like an “Indian” might have made their way to northern Europe in 60 BC. I can also imagine that perhaps this 2,000 year old, second-hand anecdote might be missing some critical information, or might be flawed in some way. Nevertheless, Pliny certainly didn’t think these shipwrecked sailors were from anywhere but India; that deductive leap was apparently made in the 16th century and is repeated here by Forbes. And Loewen leaps even further, saying that they became “major curiosities in Europe,” implying that this occurred at the time, in 60 BC. I can only assume he meant that the legend of this story became famous down through the centuries, which appears to be true.1
It’s not impossible that pre-Colombian indigenous North Americans might’ve made it to Europe. We know from the Polynesian migrations that ancient people could traverse vast stretches of ocean when they wanted to. But this mangled anecdote is certainly not enough to justify Loewen casually dropping it into his book as if it’s anywhere near a settled fact.
So now, a conundrum. I learned a lot from this book, obviously. But as an adult, I see things in it that make me skeptical, that make me doubt whether I should share it and risk passing on some of the less substantiated factoids along with the good stuff. I don’t know—perhaps that’s part of the lesson. That no book is perfect, no author without some blind spots. I have a few years to think it over, at least. But it’s given me a lot to consider.
Since we’re on the topic of books that lie, I want to talk about two examples—the most egregious one I’ve ever encountered and another, more recent one that’s just sloppy.
First, the egregious one.
Back in 2021, I received a galley of Women in the Picture: What Culture Does With Female Bodies, by Catherine McCormack, an art historian and teacher at Sotheby’s. In it, McCormack analyzes how women have been depicted in art through the centuries, particularly with regards to race, sexuality, and gendered violence. I was excited to read it and, for the first few chapters at least, was really intrigued by the book’s arguments.
But late in the book, McCormack makes an interesting statement. She notes that as late as 1944, an English woman, Helen Duncan, was prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and says that she has “yet to be exonerated for her ‘crimes’”—heavily implying that she was a victim of modern-day misogynists reaching back into the ignorant past in order to persecute an innocent woman.
My first reaction was—wow, that is crazy. My second was that it sounded pretty strange. Prosecuting a woman for witchcraft in the UK in 1944? And what about the fact that the legislation in question was from 1735? Isn’t that a little late to be persecuting witches? It didn’t take me long to find that McCormack wasn’t being completely honest about Mrs. Duncan’s situation.
In fact, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was a progressive law that banned witch hunting; it also made it illegal to falsely claim to have magical powers, which is what got Ms. Duncan into trouble. A professional medium, she was prosecuted under the Act for claiming to be able to commune with spirits in an effort to defraud her credulous customers. Her story is actually fascinating—she managed to hear a rumor about a Royal Navy ship that had been sunk by the Germans and began telling people that she was communicating with the dead sailors. The only problem was that the sinking of the ship hadn’t been officially announced, and her claims drew the attention of the Royal Navy.
Duncan has “yet to be exonerated for her crimes” because she was guilty of them. Apparently, to this day, her descendants are trying to get her pardoned on the grounds that she actually did have supernatural powers.
Did McCormack know all this about Helen Duncan? She must have. Did she willfully misrepresent the facts to support her book’s argument. It appears so.
McCormack then proceeded to provide some more flimsy history to her readers, using archaeological evidence of Scythian warrior women to push the much discredited claim that the Amazons were not a myth, but a real matriarchal society whose existence has been suppressed by patriarchal historians fearful of female power. As renowned classicist and feminist Mary Beard (who McCormack quotes approvingly in her chapter on Venus) once said, “An enormous amount of modern feminist energy has been wasted” on this dubious idea and, for me, McCormack’s enthusiastic endorsement of it casts doubt on much of the historical analysis in the rest of the book.
It’s a shame, because there’s plenty of genuine exploitation, repression, and misrepresentation to be angry about. Why make something up? McCormack’s insights into how rape culture is woven into the very fabric of the administrative state through the EU’s appropriation of the mythological rape victim Europa as a symbol of “cooperation, of political harmony, of mutual interests, shared bonds and greater good” are powerful and provocative. It’s just one example of how we as a society are unwilling to acknowledge the uncomfortable, embarrassing and shameful parts of our history, which McCormack rightly notes sets the stage for ignoring the crimes and transgressions of the present. But misrepresenting facts and indulging in historical conspiracy theories does no one any favors.
O.K., now for the more recent one.
I’m not going to mention the book, which comes out in May. I was reading a galley, so there’s still time for the error to be resolved—and I intend to check when the finished copies become available. But it’s a book about recent history, about art in the 1980s, and it opens with an anecdote about Sinead O’Connor’s infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.
This, of course, is one of the most indelible moments in all of pop culture. It has been written about extensively and is readily accessible on video—you can watch it on demand. And somehow, this author managed to get it completely wrong.
“Fight the real power!” she said, echoing Public Enemy’s hit of two years earlier.
Now, everybody knows—or at least, I thought they knew—that Sinead says “Fight the real enemy.”
(As an aside, I think it’s pretty crass how Saturday Night Live has claimed Sinead’s performance as a part of its storied history—recently featuring this moment and her music at its 50th anniversary performances—given how poorly they treated her in the initial aftermath. None of their retrospectives included the monologue from the subsequent week, where where Joe Pesci says he’d have slapped her2 while the audience applauds.3 Was there ever any rapprochement there? When she was made a pariah, they were all too willing to go along with it; now that history looks back on that moment with more understanding, or at least with less shock, the show weaves it into its history as just another exciting moment on live television. I don’t know, it rubs me the wrong way.)
This error, of course, is just sloppy. I don’t think the author is trying to pull anything over on us—they just got caught up in a too-cute connection between Sinead and Public Enemy. But it’s hard to believe that no one caught this before the book was made available to reviewers. And I’m curious as to whether it’ll be resolved once it hits bookshelves—and if not, whether critics will pick up on it. This error appeared within the first five pages of the book. I stopped reading right there. If you can’t get something so easy right, why should I believe anything you say? You don’t have to translate Pliny’s Latin to get this right, you just have to check YouTube.
There’s no point in being a passive reader. You are in dialogue with the book you’re reading, and you shouldn’t give it any more of the benefit of the doubt that you would give to some stranger you met on the street. Whatever it’s flaws, Loewen’s book taught me that—and I don’t doubt that he would’ve been satisfied to find that I turned his own lesson around on him and held him to his own standard.
When I was a child, my grandfather and great aunts (who came from the Aran Islands in Ireland), claimed we had Spanish heritage, owing to ancestors who washed up on shore after the rout of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This is a common legend in Ireland; it even shows up in John Broderick’s The Pilgrimage, which I read recently. It is, however, false. But my grandfather and great aunts believed it, there was circumstantial evidence that seemed to gibe with it, and I had no reason to doubt them. But the informed skeptic in me went looking for more information and found the truth.
Here’s a good example of how mistakes can happen, and how they can be avoided: I originally wrote that Joe Pesci tore up a photo of Sinead O’Connor in his monologue. This is false. He holds up the reconstructed photo of the Pope. But that’s not how I remembered it. Before I finalized this draft, I went and looked up the monologue to check and discovered I was wrong and fixed it. QED.
SNL picked up the pieces and taped them back together so Pesci could show it had been fixed. But one piece is still missing. You know why? David Spade had it.
Heartily agree about the SNL cooptation. I never watched the show live, just reruns on Comedy Central, but I remember hearing about it and thinking "fucking awesome, what a badass!" and being totally baffled at how upset all the numpties were. About a picture!
Good thoughtful piece as usual. The weirdo anecdote in Loewen almost sounds like an Easter egg: "see, kids! Told you to pay attention!" but is probably just a sign of the impossibility of objectivity and absolute faith to facts that afflicts us and cannot be resisted. Even your favorites fuck up, and never meet your idols. Except Patti Smith, who is perfect and whose every work is exactly as it should be.