took part, whether a sporting event or the Iraq War. We read partly in a spirit of
criticism, assessing what the authors got wrong as well as agreeing with and
perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant
past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive.
Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little
ground on which to stand and criticize what we read.
Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha—
of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were
alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani
—generalized ancestors—is more their style. By definition, the world of the
sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and
understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less
said about the recent past, the better.
I examined how the ten narrative American histories in my original sample
covered the five decades leading up to the 1980s. (I excluded the 1980s
because some of the older textbooks came out in that decade, so they could not
be expected to cover it fully.) On average, the textbooks give forty-seven pages
to the 1930s, forty-four to the 1940s, and fewer than thirty-five pages to each
later decade. Even the turbulent decade of the 1960s—including the civil rights
movement, most of the Vietnam War, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy—got fewer than
thirty-five pages.^5
Textbooks in 2006-07 show quite a different approach. Now the 1960s are
no longer recent history, so textbooks can give them the emphasis they should
always have received, fifty-five pages. (That total is greater than for any other
decade of the twentieth century.) But today’s texts, published between 2000
and 2007, give short shrift to the new recent past, the 1980s, 1990s, and
2000s.^6 Now they devote forty-nine pages to the 1930s and forty-seven to the
1940s, but fewer than twenty to the 1980s and 1990s (even tossing in the first
years of the new millennium). Yet these were important decades in which the
United States twice attacked Iraq, went through the second presidential
impeachment trial in history, saw its closest and most disputed election in
more than a century, and endured the terrorist strikes of 9/11/2001.
Each of these matters is still contentious, however. Some parents are
Democrats, some Republicans, so what authors say about the impeachment and