Colorado State University - Pueblo Voices of America features Doris Kearns Goodwin

Pueblo-  Historian and University of Vermont Professor James Loewen will present the final lecture in the four-part Voices of America Distinguished Lecture Series at Colorado State University-Pueblo on Monday, May 12. The event will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the OUC Ballroom on the CSU-Pueblo campus. Copies of Loewen’s books will be available for sale at a 20 percent discount that evening and prior to the event at the CSU-Pueblo Bookstore.

Loewen also will be the featured speaker at a workshop for educators from 3:30-5:30 p.m. on May 12. Educators should call 719-369-3026 to make reservations both for the workshop and the performance. Tickets are not necessary for the evening performance.
The lecture series is made possible by a grant co-sponsored by CSU-Pueblo’s history department, Pueblo School District 70, and a consortium of 16 southeastern Colorado school districts under the umbrella of the Southern Colorado Teacher Education Alliance. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The grant aims to improve K-12 school history programs through professional development for regional American history teachers.

The author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen has sold more than 800,000 books and continues to inspire K-16 teachers to get students to challenge, rather than memorize, their textbooks. He now lives in Washington, D.C., continuing his research on how Americans remember their past. Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong came out in 1999. Loewen taught race relations for 20 years at the University of Vermont and previously taught at predominantly black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The Gustavus Myers Foundation named his new book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, a Distinguished Book of 2005. He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases.

Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying 12 leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds, and the result was the best-selling Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong. An educator who attended Carleton College, he holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.

His other books include Mississippi: Conflict and Change (co authored), which won the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction but was rejected for public school text use by the State of Mississippi, leading to the path breaking First Amendment lawsuit, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al. He also wrote The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, Social Science in the Courtroom, and The Truth About Columbus.

His awards include the First Annual Spivack Award of the American Sociological Association for "sociological research applied to the field of intergroup relations," the American Book Award (for Lies My Teacher Told Me), and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. He is also Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.


Colorado State University - Pueblo is a regional, comprehensive university emphasizing professional, career-oriented, and applied programs. Displaying excellence in teaching, celebrating diversity, and engaging in service and outreach, CSU-Pueblo is distinguished by access, opportunity, and the overall quality of services provided to its students.