vapid cheer. “The American spirit surged with vitality as the nation headed
toward the close of the twentieth century,” the authors of The American
Pageant assured us in 1991, ignoring opinion polls that suggest the opposite.
Fifteen years later, “The American spirit pulsed with vitality in the early
twenty-first century,” they write, but now “grave problems continued to plague
the Republic.” Life and Liberty climbs farther out on this hollow limb:
“America will have a great role to play in these future events. What this nation
does depends on the people in it.” Can’t argue with that! “Problems lie ahead,
certainly,” predicts American Adventures. “But so do opportunities.”The
American people “need only the will and the commitment to meet the new
challenges of the future,” according to Triumph of the American Nation. In
short, all we must do to prepare for the morrow is keep our collective chin up.
Or as Holt American Nation put it in 2003, “Americans faced the future with
hope and determination.”^5
Back in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me poked fun at textbooks for such
endings. Obviously Lies had little influence on textbook publishers.
Well, why not end happily? might be one response. We don’t want to
depress high school students. After all, it’s not really history anyway—we
cannot know for sure what’s going to come next. So let’s end on an upbeat.
Indeed, just as we don’t know with precision what went on thousands of
years ago, we cannot know with precision what will happen next. Precisely for
this reason, the endings of these books provide another site where authors
might appropriately provoke intellectual curiosity. Can students apply ideas
they have learned from these huge American history textbooks? After all, as
Shakespeare said, “the past is prologue.” If we understand what has caused
what in the past, we may be able to predict what will happen next and even
adopt national policies informed by our knowledge. Surely helping students
learn to do so is the key reason for teaching history in the first place. If history
textbooks supplied tools for projection or examples of causation in the past
that might (or might not) continue into the future, they would encourage students
to think about what they have just spent a year learning. What a thrilling way to
end a history textbook!