The author, a college professor, begins with two familiar historical figures -- Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson -- and illustrates how their treatment in textbooks, which he dubs "heroification," distorts them. Most students are unaware that Keller was a radical socialist who championed women's suffrage and supported workers' rights or that Wilson was a racist who eliminated African Americans from government positions.

Loewen devotes three chapters to domination, beginning with Columbus. He posits that textbook coverage of Columbus discourages students from thinking about domination. He discusses the introduction of disease that decimated Native Americans and was "the most important geopolitical event of the early 17th century" (p. 81). He also contends that "more than any other celebration . . . Thanksgiving celebrates our ethnocentrism" (p. 93). He counters the myth of Native Americans as savage by illustrating how highly civilized they were.

Another chapter analyzes textbook depiction of slavery. Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, history texts treat slavery somewhat more honestly. However, many of today's adults learned history before then. Thus, few adults "realize that our society has been slave much longer that it has been free" (p. 142). Loewen illustrates how most textbooks treat slavery as part of history, but avoid placing it in the larger context of racism. One chapter describes white abolitionists, especially John Brown, and discusses Lincoln's idealism about abolishing slavery.

Loewen then turns to the issue of class in America, a topic largely ignored in high school history texts. Of the twelve texts he studied, not one listed "working class" or "lower class" in the index. He feels that when students are ignorant of the chasm between rich and poor, they can fall into the trap of blaming the victims for their poverty.

Chapter 8 describes what Loewen dubs "textbooks' sycophancy" (p. 216) to the federal government. Textbooks glorify government programs like the Peace Corps. But they overlook the economic influence of U.S. foreign policy, U. S. attempts to overthrow or even kill leaders of other countries (e.g., Cuba's Fidel Castro, Zaire's Patrice Lumumba), and the FBI's efforts to deny rights to African-Americans and to sabotage Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders.

Recent history is also lacking in high school textbooks. Particularly absent are the photographs that have seared recent events into Americans' memories. Most textbooks have so little coverage of the Vietnam War that "only 2 - 4% of college students say that they had any substantial treatment of the Vietnam War in high school" (p. 252). Most texts ignore the women's rights and gay rights movement that had such profound effects on our society. According to Loewen, textbooks gloss over anything that might be perceived as negative or controversial, leaving what he calls "Disney World history" (p. 253).

A later chapter describes the textbook selection process. The upper classes control publishing, and almost half the states - including large, influential states like Texas and California - have textbooks adoption committees. In some states, public hearings are also part of the process. Publishers try to please these groups by avoiding controversial or negative material, and too few teachers complain about textbooks.

The book ends with illustrations of how distorted textbooks and poor history teaching leads to "feel-good history for the affluent white males…[and] feel-bad history for everyone else" (p. 301). Loewen recommends that high school history textbooks and teachers cover fewer topics but examine them in more depth and encourage students to ask questions and think critically, rather than just memorize facts to pass tests.