Note: This interview appears in the September/October issue of NAI's Legacy magazine.

James Loewen is the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. His most recent book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, details the practice of American communities that kept out blacks and other groups through intimidation and violence for decades—and some that still do to this day. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases, and he is Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He will be a keynote speaker at the 2007 NAI National Workshop in Wichita, Kansas, November 6–10.

What are the “lies” you have discovered at historic sites?
Sites don’t want to say anything bad about themselves. For example, James Buchanan was homosexual. To many people, that’s bad. When I went to Buchanan’s birthplace, the site not only did not mention anything about that, but when staff members were asked directly, they denied it.

Something that sites do even less of is historiography. They almost never talk about how they used to present their past. Most sites tell you what happened in 1863 if it’s a Civil War site, but they don’t suggest that what they are saying is anything other than the eternal truth. That’s too bad, because visitors don’t understand that what we say about the past may not be the past. They don’t get any sense that a historical site should get critiqued.

What’s the difference between the lies at an interpretive site and the lies in a textbook?
The advantage of textbooks over historic sites is that they’re still available after they go out of date. It’s hard to get a 1970 interpretation of Gettysburg at Gettysburg, but it’s easy to get a 1970 edition of Triumph of the American Nation, the predecessor textbook to Holt American Nation. An enterprising teacher can collect textbooks for 50 cents each because they’re the slowest-selling books in used book stores. This makes for fascinating projects when students compare textbooks that were written in 1950, 1970, 1990, and 2007.

Do the errors in history books and at historical sites reflect an agenda or are their omissions simply errors of ignorance?
My first teaching job was at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a historically black institution. I was teaching a section of the freshman social science seminar, a course invented by the history department to introduce students to all of the social sciences in the context of African-American history. I had a new group of students that first day of class in January of 1969. I asked them, “What is Reconstruction? What happened then?” Overwhelmingly, 16 out of 17 of them replied, “That was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states, but they were too soon out of slavery, so they screwed up and white folks had to take control again.” Now, of course, there are at least three direct lies in that sentence. Blacks never took over the government of the Southern states, the Reconstruction governments did not screw up—Mississippi in particular had probably better government during Reconstruction than it had at any later point in the 19th century—and white folks didn’t retake control (a certain group of white folks took control, but that’s another matter).

How could they have learned this? How could they say this? I looked at the book they were using for their required course in ninth grade Mississippi history. It’s a book by John K. Bettersworth, full professor of history at Mississippi State, and in it, that’s exactly what he said. I know he knew better because he then reviewed three books on Reconstruction for The New York Times Book Review. In his review, he showed that he held what was then a pretty standard interpretation of Reconstruction, but that’s not what he wrote in his textbook. This showed me that history can be a weapon, that it can be used against you, and it had been used against my students.

The biggest problem is that textbook authors and publishers don’t want to offend. They have the idea that if they said anything bad about the United States—or, let’s say, about one of my candidates for the worst president of the United States, Franklin W. Pierce from New Hampshire, well, that might offend New Hampshire! Then, they might not adopt their book. Historic sites especially don’t want to offend their own community. I therefore think the more local the site, the more pallid and tasteless the history. And by tasteless I don’t mean that it’s off-color. I mean that it doesn’t have much taste.

Is it fair to say that the overarching point of your books is that history gets distorted when textbooks and historic sites cater to majority points of view and minority viewpoints are not represented?
Yes, that’s true. It behooves any historic site to reach out to a diverse audience. One of the ways to do that is to solicit advisory board and full board members from diverse groups. If I were the executive director of the Smith County Historical Society and Museum in a mythical Smith County, I would first try to make sure, if Smith County had a black population, that I had an African-American advisory board, or at least one African-American member on my regular board. The same goes for gay and lesbian folks or folks from the armed forces or Native Americans or whatever different groups you can think of, especially whatever group is having its story told or should be having its story told.
The next thing I would do is allow for debate, so that you might have maybe more than one sign or more than one label on a given exhibit. I’m not suggesting that we would have nontruthful labels. Some people think, “Why should we privilege one narrative above the other with the term ‘True’?” I reply to that, “Yeah, right, and the Civil War started in 1876 and it began in California after a dispute between the Chinese workers and the Transcontinental Railroad about their pay.” People look at me as if I’m crazy and say, “But that’s not true,” and of course it isn’t. I made about six historical blunders in that short sentence. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but they don’t have a right to their own facts. I’m not suggesting that we just write any damn thing on museum walls, but I would note, for instance, that historical markers have two sides.

Why is the history of sundown towns “hidden”?
A sundown town is a town that for decades kept out black folks or other groups like Chinese-Americans or Jewish-Americans. Some still do. The history of sundown towns has been so well hidden that it had to hit me upside the head, and I’m a person who has spent decades in the field of race relations. When I went to write the book, I had learned of just a handful of sundown towns. I expected to find maybe 10 sundown towns in Illinois and maybe 50 across the country. I knew I was going to do more research in Illinois than in any other single state, just because I grew up there. To my astonishment, I am now at the exact number of 500 probable sundown towns in Illinois alone. That is 70 percent of all incorporated communities in the state, with a similar percentage obtained in Oregon, Indiana, and in various other Northern states. No one, myself included, had any idea that this was the case—at least no one I’ve ever met.

Historical museums play a major role in the hiding. There are only about two or three historical museums in about 10,000 communities across the United States that I know of that treat the fact that their town excluded a specific group. This is an example where we all, collectively, become stupid. Historical museums are lying down on their job, or to put it a little more accurately, they are doing what they misperceive to be their job: representing the best of their community instead of telling what happened in their community.

Sundown Towns debunks the myth that racism is a Southern phenomenon. Why are so many of these communities found in the North as opposed to the South?
White Southerners thought it was crazy. They thought, “Who’s going to do all the work? Who’s going to be the maid? Who’s going to be the janitor?” They had no intention of driving out their black population because they were making money off them. They were making use of them. In the North, during the period 1890 to 1940, I think whites took seriously the infamous words in the Dred Scott decision—even though Dred Scott had been overruled by the Civil War—that blacks had no rights. If we’re dealing with people that had no rights, why the heck would we even let them in our community?

Hollywood, that I know of, has four movies that use the term sundown town or show one of the traditional sundown town signs, which typically read, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you in Manitowoc.” (Manitowoc, Wisconsin, had such a sign.) Three of these movies are set in Mississippi and one in Georgia. Meanwhile, Hollywood makes movies about actual sundown towns without recognizing them for what they are. For example, Hoosiers is about one sundown town’s basketball team playing against another sundown town’s team in a third sundown town, Jasper, Indiana. Hollywood disguises the truth by sticking a couple of black folks in the crowd scene and having a black cymbal player in the band.

What research methods do you use to determine that a stated fact in a history book or at an interpretive site is untrue?
In the case of Lies Across America and, especially, Lies My Teacher Told Me, I rely on the best work I can find by academic historians in most cases. James McPherson, famed historian of the Civil War, is not going to learn anything new from my book about the Civil War. The same thing is true for what I say about early American Indian populations—anthropologists and archaeologists are not going to be astonished by what I write there.

Sundown Towns is not based on literature because I couldn’t find any. There are maybe five works, and I cite them all over the place when I can. I had to base that work on oral history. Now, I try to do good oral history. I ask the person I’m talking to, “How do you know that, what you just told me? Who told you? When did they tell you?” So far, I’m not aware that I’ve made a significant mistake in the book. A lot of people are astonished by it, but nobody has ever said, “You’ve got such and such identified as a sundown town and they didn’t have that policy and they had black residents, etc.”

Has a historical site or other entity ever changed its practices because of information you have brought to light?
None of them has sent me a letter saying, “Oh, we’re so happy that you hit us upside the head.” But I’ll give you two examples. The last photo in Lies My Teacher Told Me is a picture of a historical marker in southwestern Mississippi that gets everything wrong. It says something like, “As Ulysses S. Grant’s Bluecoats marched up the road towards Jackson, the residents of this area gathered to watch in stony silence....” Well 80 percent of the residents then and 80 percent of the residents now were and are African-American. This was the biggest day of their lives because this was the day they became free. They did not gather and watch in stony silence. Even some of the white folks were delighted that the United States was reclaiming sovereignty over the state of Mississippi. They hooted, they hollered, and they showed the United States forces where the best road to Jackson was, where the best place was to ford the creek, and so on. That marker is just completely upside down in its interpretation of history, and I attacked it. Then it disappeared. I can’t get the state of Mississippi to tell me what happened to it—whether they took it down or whether it got hit by a mowing machine. I have personally visited where I personally saw it, and it’s gone.

The second example is from Delaware. Neither Delaware nor almost anywhere else in United States treats what I call the Reverse Underground Railroad—the passage from freedom into slavery, the kidnapping of African-Americans in the North and free blacks in the South and enslaving them. Right at the border of Delaware and Maryland in Reliance, Delaware, there was the largest single kidnapping gang in the east, and the landscape is silent about it. So a resident of Delaware, bless his heart, thought this was an outrage and he single-handedly persuaded the state historical society and agency to put up a marker.

Sundown Towns is getting some interest from within HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and DOJ (Department of Justice), because it’s so indefensible that we actually have towns that even to this day enforce an all-white policy.

You’re careful to mention the weight and length of the history textbooks you surveyed. What is the relevance of those numbers?
Unfortunately, the new books are getting longer. Instead of 888 pages in the 1980s, they now average 1,154 pages. Instead of four and a half pounds, they now average about six pounds. As soon as you try to cover 1,154 pages, you can’t cover anything. You can’t question the historiography. You can’t get into debates. You can’t get into anything. It gets into mindless mentioning, what I call “Twig History.” We’re not just missing the forest for the trees. We’re not even teaching trees, we’re teaching twigs.

What can visitors to historical sites do to assure that the information they’re getting is valid?
First, they can visit the site on the Web ahead of time and research some of the points that are being made. Second, they can ask two questions. First, suppose you were just told, “The slaves at this plantation were happy. They were treated well.” Ask, “How do you know that? Is there evidence from the slaves themselves?” Second, ask about the historiography: “How did this site tell its story before the Civil Rights Movement or in some other era?” Such questions will usually drive the curator or the guide or the docent bananas, but if they do drive them bananas, well, then, what do you learn from that?