Wilfred Reilly Exposes Liberal Historical Myths

Such narratives have the alarming tendency to feed into myths about the present.

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula By Wilfred Reilly (Broadside Books, 272 pages, $25) Ronald Reagan once quipped, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” This observation from the fortieth president finds resonance in political scientist Wilfred Reilly’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula. The title is a less-than-subtle spoof of James Loewen’s 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which critiqued mainstream conceptions of American history as overly Eurocentric and pro-American. Lies My Teacher Told Me was joined in that genre by others, including Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and, more recently, the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. What might have once been the raising of some valid quibbles has become a cure worse than the disease. Today, it is the Left that is pushing scholastic fictions into the cultural mainstream while larping as revolutionaries.  Don’t underestimate the impact of this. Even Americans who are apolitical or disinterested in history have imbibed a great deal of false premises via cultural osmosis. For example, the 1619 Project and A People’s History of the United States are often assigned to American students.  This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. The leftist vision of history constitutes a sort of cultural hypochondria in which every past action by the West that fails to measure up to current standards needs to be agonized over, even as such violations by others are steadfastly ignored. “If the old myth,” Reilly writes, “was that American and the West could do no wrong, the new hotness is that every wrong is uni...