people listed as authors on some other textbooks have even less to do with
them. Some teachers and historians merely rent their names to publishers,
supplying occasional advice in return for a fraction of the usual royalties,
while minions in the bowels of the publishing houses do the work of organizing
and writing the textbooks. Often these anonymous clerks have only a BA in
English, according to an editor at McGraw-Hill.^47
An executive at Prentice Hall told me that Daniel Boorstin “controls every
word that goes into his book,” which does not claim that he wrote it but does
imply substantial author involvement. We will see later that even this claim
cannot be substantiated. Prentice Hall relies on Davidson and Lytle to keep A
History of the Republic current in historical content, according to the
publisher. Even these modest claims are suspect, however. Mark Lytle
admitted that he and his coauthor play only “a kind of authentication role”
regarding new editions. The publisher initiates the new material, and it is “too
late to make any major changes once it reaches us.”
In 2006, as I was studying the six new textbooks for this revised edition of
Lies My Teacher Told Me, one topic I focused on was their treatments of the
recent past, especially of our two Iraq wars and the attacks of 9/11/2001 on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To my astonishment, I found that for
paragraph after paragraph, two books—America: Pathways to the Present, by
Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth Perry, Linda Reed, and Allan Winkler, and A
History of the United States, by Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley—
were identical, or nearly identical. Here, for example, are the first paragraphs
of their discussion of the disputed Florida election between Bush and Gore in
2000.
On election night, the votes in several states were too close to call;
neither candidate had captured the 270 electoral votes needed to win
the presidency. One undecided state, Florida, could give either
candidate enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Because the
vote there was so close, state law required a recount of the ballots.
Florida became a battleground for the presidency as lawyers,
politicians, and the media swarmed there to monitor the recount.
—America: Pathways to the Present
On election night the votes in several states were too close to call