Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong

Some myths don’t die, and lies are still being told about Christopher Columbus: that he “discovered” the Americas (not only was the land familiar to native inhabitants, but it had also been visited before by Europeans), that the land was sparsely populated by native people (there were fourteen million inhabitants in 1492), that those people were primitive (Europeans learned a lot and gained technology and agricultural skill from Native Americans), and that they submitted to Columbus’s “God-like” authority (they submitted to the deadly smallpox and bubonic plague that Columbus’s crew imported from Europe).

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus disproves the myths about Columbus still enshrined in American textbooks with quotations from primary source material that sets the record straight. The poster and accompanying 48–page paperback book sum up the mistellings—and reveal the real story—in a graphically appealing and accessible format that shows the degree to which textbooks have “lied” by knowingly substituting crowd-pleasing myths for grim and gruesome historical evidence.

• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
• Profiles in Courage
• Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years
• Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong
• The Historians’ Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time
• Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
• Teach Like a PIRATE: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator
• Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series)