James W. Loewen

James William Loewen (February 6, 1942 – August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. A 2005 book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, galvanized a national effort to develop a list of sundown towns.

Loewen was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois. His father David was a medical director and physician from an immigrant Mennonite community; his mother, Winifred (Gore), was a librarian and teacher. Loewen was a National Merit Scholar, graduating from MacArthur High School in 1960.

He attended Carleton College. In 1963, as a junior, he spent a semester in Mississippi, an experience in a different culture that led him to question what he had been taught about United States history. He was intrigued by learning about the unique place of 19th-century Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Mississippi culture, commonly thought of as biracial. Loewen later earned a PhD in sociology from Harvard University based on his research on Chinese Americans in Mississippi.

Loewen first taught in Mississippi at Tougaloo College, a historically black college founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War. Subsequently, he taught about racism for 20 years at the University of Vermont, where he was Professor Emeritus of Sociology. Starting in 1997, he was a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He was selected for honoris causa membership in Omicron Delta Kappa in 1997 at SUNY Plattsburgh.

Loewen co-edited Mississippi: Conflict & Change (1974), a Mississippi history textbook with Charles Sallis. It won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Nonfiction in 1975. However, it was rejected for use in Mississippi's public schools by the Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board on the grounds that it was too controversial and placed too much focus on racial matters.

Loewen challenged the board decision in a federal lawsuit, Loewen v. Turnipseed (1980) 488 F. Supp. 1138 (N.D. Miss.). Judge Orma R. Smith of the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ruled that the rejection of the textbook was not based on "justifiable grounds" and that the authors were denied their right to free speech and press.

The American Library Association considers Loewen v. Turnipseed a historic First Amendment case and one of the foundations of the "right to read freely."

Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution, where he studied and compared 12 American history textbooks then widely used throughout the US. He published his findings in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), which was republished in 2007 and 2018. He concluded that textbook authors propagate factually false, Eurocentric, and mythologized views of history. Loewen points out in the book that many of the distortions found in American history texts are "not even by the authors whose names grace the cover." In March 2012, the book's publisher, The New Press, listed Lies My Teacher Told Me as their top all-time bestseller. The book reflects Loewen's belief that history should not be taught as straightforward facts and dates to memorize, but rather as analysis of the context and root causes of events.