As long as you are convinced you
have never done anything, you can
never do anything.
—MALCOLM X^4To study foreign affairs without
putting ourselves into others’ shoes
is to deal in illusion and to prepare
students for a lifelong
misunderstanding of our place in the
world.
—PAUL GAGNON^5SOME TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS, critics of the new emphasis on social
and cultural history, believe that American history textbooks have been
seduced from their central narrative, which they see as the story of the
American state. Methinks they protest too much. The expanded treatments that
textbooks now give to women, slavery, modes of transportation, developments
in popular music, and other topics not directly related to the state have yet to
produce a new core narrative. Therefore, they appear as unnecessary
diversions that only interrupt the basic narrative that the textbooks still tell: the
history of the American government. Two of the twelve textbooks in my initial
sample were “inquiry” textbooks, mostly assembled from primary sources.
They no longer made the story of the state quite so central.^6 The ten narrative
textbooks in that sample and all current textbooks continue to pay
overwhelming attention to the actions of the executive branch of the federal
government. They still demarcate U.S. history as a series of presidential
administrations.
Thus, for instance, Land of Promise grants each president a biographical
vignette, even William Henry Harrison (who served for one month), but never
mentions arguably our greatest composer, Charles Ives; our most influential
architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; or our most prominent non-Indian humanitarian