He chastised textbook authors for ignoring the history of labor unions and leaving students with the impression that the mistreatment of workers was something “that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago.”

Loewen prided himself on pointing out the socialist beliefs of Helen Keller or the diversity of American Indian culture. He gave his chapters such headlines as “The Truth About the First Thanksgiving,” “Gone With the Wind: The Invisibility of American Racism in American Textbooks” and “See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam.” He based his findings on his research while on fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, where he spent two years looking through textbooks. Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” was published in 1995 and became a favorite of students and former students as it challenged what Loewen considered a white, Eurocentric view of the past and the stale prose and bland presentations of classroom books. “Achieving justice in the present helps us tell the truth about the past.” “Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present,” was his guiding principle, he wrote. A professor emeritus at the University of Vermont who lived in Washington, D.C., he had been diagnosed two years ago with Stage IV bladder cancer, enough time for him to post “Notes toward an obituary” on his website. Loewen’s publisher, New Press, announced that the author died Thursday at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Loewen, whose million-selling “Lies My Teacher Told Me” books challenged traditional ideas and knowledge on everything from Thanksgiving to the Iraq War, has died.

Loewen james w