And by “original,” I don’t mean the Pilgrims. I don’t mean the Jamestown settlers, who arrived some 13 years earlier. I don’t mean the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565. I don’t even mean the African slaves who escaped their Spanish captors, who had landed in 1526 in modern South Carolina. Those Spanish shortly left for Haiti, but their ex-slaves stayed and became American immigrants. These ex-slaves were probably the very first non-native settlers of America, the very first true African-Americans.

But what I mean by “original” Americans— I mean those who traveled across the Bering Strait, into modern Alaska, spreading throughout the Americas, settling and developing that land sometime between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago— We don’t really know exactly when. But we do know a bit about these Americans, when they were no longer just settlers, but rather established residents, from the 15’th century on. And we know a bit about how their culture—then a vibrant and living culture—affected what would become our modern American culture, in ways that you may not realize.

Of course, maybe you are already aware of these bits of knowledge, which I’ve gleaned from my current non-fiction read, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen, (which I should have read many years ago, but which unfortunately is still not completely out of date, even though I’m reading an earlier edition than the latest). Even if you know these, most of us are basically ignorant of them, never having gotten past the myths, popular legends, and one-dimensional factoids.

After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, James W. Loewen has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.

I finally picked up Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (an earlier edition than the one pictured above), which has been sitting on my shelf for years. As a writer, I haven’t been reading enough non-fiction. So I started a non-fiction read that I can really get into.

Loewen’s thesis is that the way history is taught is too loaded down with factoids, not built up enough with drama— I know that my high-school history was taught that way. I hated it. It wasn’t until years after I graduated high school that I began to discover history, because history is full of drama. Never are our historical figures as one-dimensional as we try to make them appear. They are never pure “heroes” or “villains,” but rather deep, realistic characters, full of conflict. And Loewen delves deep into those conflicts.

I’m hooked.