trial of Bill Clinton will likely offend half the community. An increasing
proportion of Americans believe the Iraq War to be a bad idea, but if authors
say that, they will alienate some important people, perhaps including school
board members. Homosexuality is even more taboo as a subject of discussion
or learning in American high schools. Affirmative action leads to angry
debates. The women’s movement can still be a minefield, even though it
peaked in the 1970s. Every school district includes parents who strongly
affirm traditional sex roles and others who do not. So let’s not say much about
feminism today; let’s leave it in the 1970s. Thus authors tiptoe through the
sasha with extreme caution, evading all the main issues, all the “why”
questions.
Textbook authors are not solely responsible for the slighting of the recent
past in high school history courses. Many teachers also lack courage or simply
run out of time. Even if textbooks gave the sasha the space it deserves, most
students would have to read about it on their own, because most teachers never
get near the end of the textbook. In her yearlong American history course, fifth-
grade teacher Chris Zajac, subject of Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren,
never gets past Reconstruction!^7 Time is not the only problem. Like publishers,
teachers do not want to risk offending parents. The result is a treatment of the
recent past along the line suggested by Thumper’s mom: “If you can’t say
some-thin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”
One excuse authors and publishers sometimes give for their compressed and
bland accounts of the recent past in American history textbooks is precisely
that it is so recent. We don’t know how historians will view the period once
they have achieved the detachment that historical perspective will bring, so the
less said, the better.
For topics in the zamani, textbook authors do indeed use historical
perspective as a shield. By writing in an omniscient boring tone about events
in the zamani , authors imply that a single historic truth exists, upon which
historians have agreed and which they now teach and students should now
memorize. Such writing implies that our historical perspective grows ever
more accurate with the passage of time, blessing today’s textbook authors with
cumulative historical insight. They cannot use historical perspective to defend
their treatment of events in the sasha, however. Without historical perspective,
textbook authors appear naked: no particular qualification gives them the right
to narrate recent events with the same Olympian detachment and absolute