and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from
fear.” As a historical statement, that caption is questionable, showing none of
the sophistication one of the authors, James McPherson, brought to his book
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. The next page
brings a time line of the 1930s with only four events on it: Japan invades
Manchuria, Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany, Italy invades Ethiopia, and
Germany seizes Czechoslovakia. At the risk of suggesting more cluttering,
plenty of room remains for more entries, such as Kristallnacht, the 1938 event
that launched Germany’s pogrom against the Jews.
Even the graphics get ruined by the busyness of modern textbooks. On the next
page after World War II in The American Journey, we see Norman Rockwell’s
famous painting The Problem We All Live With, showing a black girl dressed
in her Sunday best for her first day of school, with federal marshals walking
before and after her. Only we don’t see it well. The illustration is overlaid by
an ad for a 1957 Chevrolet, a button for the United Farm Workers grape
boycott, and a hat. Its power is further vitiated by the unfortunate layout: the
designer has moved it into the crease between pages to make room for the
caption “Vietnam veteran’s hat.” (Showing their own attention deficit disorder,
the authors give us another “Vietnam veteran’s hat” with the same caption,
superimposed over another image, a hundred pages later.) This placement cuts
out much of the forward marshal and makes the girl appear to be marching into