Rhetorical analysis
WenJun Li
4/10/16
ENGL 111
Elaine Barr
The article I choose to focus on is Loewen’s article, “The Truth about the First Thanksgiving.”
Lies My Teacher Told Me. I choose it because I think it’s pretty convincing and it achieved its
goal effectively.
According to my research, James W. Loewen, a Harvard University Ph.D. in sociology, has
taught at the predominantly black Tougaloo College in Mississippi before spending twenty years
at the University of Vermont, and currently lives in Washington, DC, continuing his research into
how people assimilate the past. Early in the book Loewen reveals how, in Vermont, he enjoys
asking first-year students in his race-relations classes about what they retain from high school
American history courses. For the most part, they are skeptical about the cultural heroes foist upon
them and have lost interest in the entire discipline of history, but hunger for useable role models.
Lies My Teacher Told Me is an analysis of how high school courses in American history and,
more particularly, the textbooks used in teaching them are a disservice to students and the nation
the texts and courses seek to protect. Comparing to Charles Mann, Loewen focused more on
students as his audiences. The evidences he used to demonstrate; the words he used to express; the
way he wrote the paper are more approachable for me. Also, his paper made more sense to me.
The devices Loewen used is the examples from text book to compare what he found in a logic
way. Lies My Teacher Told Me is the fruit of James W. Loewen’s two years of studying and
