A Better Way to Teach History: On Adapting James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me”

My heart goes out to everyone tasked with teaching history, civics, and media literacy to young people in our era. As a parent of two, it’s daunting to equip my kids with the critical thinking skills they’ll need to thrive in an increasingly foreboding future, while imparting a sense that there is even a future to build and work toward—especially when lessons of the past are routinely ignored, paywalled, or banned outright.

What an experience, then, to release a book on misinformation, national myth, and the suppression of accurate history in the middle of 2024. As a comic.

My new graphic adaptation of James Loewen’s landmark 1995 work Lies My Teacher Told Me stares down a daunting set of challenges to historical truth in a shared reality, and the power and breadth of our diverse perspectives as citizens. Three decades ago, Loewen’s ideas helped crystallize and articulate the very terms and issues currently at the heart of this struggle today, and I prioritized keeping the gravity of those ideas at the forefront of my adaptation.

So what lies there?

The late, great Loewen succinctly broke down why history is often considered the most boring subject in high school. Lies My Teacher Told Me opens with what gets lost in the shuffle: that most students can’t stand the standard classroom experience of learning American history.

This problem escapes the confines of performative partisan outrage. It’s crucial that those groans from the back of the classroom be validated and truly heard, allowing us to understand its relationship to how history textbook authors approach what to include and omit.

The long shadow cast by a feel-good nationalist myth is often at odds with our endlessly more interesting (and inspiring) factual history. Textbooks lean toward that feel-good nationalism due to very human factors: educators’ fears of retaliation, publishers’ desire for adoption, the ongoing death of expertise, and the fact that nobody’s really at the wheel writing, editing, or updating these things. Most textbooks are simply copies of each other, propagating errors and misinformation alike.

Loewen correctly identifies “heroification” as a central problem: although historical figures starring as heroes in our textbook narratives are messy, interesting, complicated humans just like us, their most fascinating aspects are often omitted in favor of a simple, flattened interpretation of history to memorize for the quiz on Friday. What does remain often doesn’t make sense on the textbook page because those inconvenient details are still crucial to a fuller historical context.

Believe it or not, the power of ideas as a driving force in history is often left out of textbooks as well. Out of fear of offending conservative white textbook adoption boards, lawmakers, parents and administrators, chapters on the American Civil War conspicuously lack both the idealism and moral imperative behind the abolition of slavery. Many textbooks indirectly endorse the claim, that no one fought to preserve enslavement, and no one fought to end it—leaving students vulnerable to long-surviving myths and misconceptions which have regained a foothold in the American consciousness over the past decade.

As a Southern child of the 1980s, I was taught the same commonly accepted Southern myths of the slaveholding South, the Lost Cause fantasy, and the Confederate myth of Reconstruction which were taught to my parents, and to their parents before them. To break the cycle of this pervasive multigenerational failure and repair our understanding  requires illuminating the cracked foundation beneath the lessons of history textbooks.

American history is often framed as an epic tale of relentless, consistent progress throughout our society. In doing so, authors paint themselves into a corner, avoiding any historical backsliding of that progress, particularly when covering the experiences of Black and Native Americans. I feel the shaky footing of what real progress has been achieved in my own lifetime as organized campaigns push to undo and outlaw the teaching of a more accurate and complex historical understanding.

The feeling of powerless that comes from absorbing history in this way is made more acute when textbooks minimize our own effectiveness as citizens in shaping our nation’s history. This comes into stark focus as we scramble to defend against and respond to future lies—unheralded challenges to the notion of a shared set of facts in a fractured, highly curated informational landscape.

Making long-form comics is a slow, meticulous process. It’s pretty nerve wracking to do relevant work about events unfolding in real time without knowing what kind of world the book will be released into. While collaborating with John Lewis and Andrew Aydin on the March trilogy in the 2010s, multiple modern activist movements swelled in ongoing pursuit of the unfulfilled promise of multiracial democracy. The United States had arrived at a nexus point; all of us, its tornado children.

Month by month, work on March felt less about decades-old history and more like connective tissue to the present moment, directly reintroducing the principles and strategies of decentralized nonviolent mass protest for a new generation. When I finished Save It For Later, an essay/memoir hybrid about activism, parenthood, and intergenerational reckoning, it was sent to the printer a mere week before Election Day in 2020, to be released into a completely unknowable political, social, and public health landscape.

For all of these books, I carried a responsibility to write and draw for that unknowable future, critically anticipating possible challenges to my work. I strived to make these books’ ideas bulletproof, knowing they’d need to stand against the vulnerabilities of time, pressure, and the chosen medium.

Releasing this new adaptation in comics form is a meaningful choice—one relevant to the looming threat from coordinated book-ban campaigns. Comics are disproportionately targeted for censorship and removal for multiple interconnected reasons, including basic misconceptions about comics, their readership, intentions, and capacity to convey information, as well as a longstanding existential battle for comics’ legitimacy as a medium, a format, and a language of its own.

People often want comics to be the single thing they’ve each decided comics should be—which often makes a comics an easy target.

Oh, they’re “not just for kids anymore.”

So they must be “for mature readers.” They’re “graphic,” after all. Says so in the name, right?

Oh wait, now they’re not strictly for adults anymore—so they must be unserious literature.

Such insistence on a monolithic definition reveals a public difficulty recognizing that comics are as boundless and versatile as prose—and in the hands of cartoonists with skill and vision, even more impactful. Comics allow empathy to grow by requiring readers to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Our capacity to feel, and to be moved by each other, is both essential to democracy and the epitome of our own humanity.

Since 2021, a coordinated far-right campaign has gained significant ground in banning and restricting access to various books at schools and libraries, with special focus on suppressing the histories, voices and experiences of LGBTQ people and people of color. Graphic novels and graphic nonfiction have been disproportionately targeted within these waves of intimidation and information-control legislation.

It’s fitting that contemporary book-ban legislation is as copy-and-paste as many standard history textbooks, making this a highly specific meme war waged against the overdue process of these books finally being updated, corrected, and contextualized for the twenty-first century. Comics’ visual nature is also a built-in vulnerability, as book-banners can find a single decontextualized image upon which to build an objection without actually reading any of the book—and comics, at their core, are built upon contextualizing images and words with each other throughout.

James Loewen recognized all of these factors at play, which was a central reason he asked me to adapt his work into the comics medium in the first place. I hope I’ve been able to do justice to his influential ideas while updating and revitalizing it for new generations of curious minds.

I feel in my bones that this adaptation of Lies My Teacher Told Me is an essential text for our shared moment as a nation, and as a wounded democracy. The process of learning, questioning, and contextualizing is as perpetual as the nature of history itself as a living, breathing thing. There is no endpoint to our individual curiosities or our questioning nature as humans—it’s how we grow as thinkers, citizens, and neighbors to each other. Beware any who suggest otherwise.

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Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen adapted and illustrated by Nate Powell is available via The New Press.