Rhetoical Patterns from "Handicapped by History" by James W. Loewen

Throughout “Handicapped by History,” author James W. Loewen uses rhetoric to contemptuously highlight the altering effects of “heroification.”

“This chapter is about Heroification, a degenerative process…that makes people over into heroes” (463).

“Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect, creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest” (463).

“Heroification so distorts the lives of Keller and Wilson that we cannot think straight about the” (464).

“Keller, who struggled so valiantly to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don’t know much about her” (464).

“To ignore the ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to like by omission” (464).

“But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and mass media left it out” (466).

“But my students seldom know…two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries” (466).

“...textbooks wriggle to get the hero off the hook…” (468).

“Some textbooks go beyond omitting the actor, and leave out the act itself” (468).”

“Surely textbook authors want us to think well of the historical figures they treat with such sympathy. And, on a superficial level at least, we do” (477).