are the same as those in another history textbook, he was taken aback. “That’s
terrible!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if they hired one of the same people who
wrote that book.” Asked for his reaction to the duplication, Kelley replied,
“I’m extremely distressed.”^48
At first Allan Winkler claimed authorship of the last chapter of Pathways to
the Present: “I wrote most of that. Then the editors played with it.” After I told
him that paragraph after paragraph are the same or nearly the same as those in
Boorstin and Kelley, he hastened to deny that he had copied from them: “I have
never even opened the Boorstin and Kelley book.” He then backed away from
the claim of authorship. “It’s possible that somebody in-house wrote that for
both books, which would appall me.” Asked for his reaction to the duplication,
Winkler replied, “I find that profoundly disturbing. Lord!”^49
Thus, neither set of authors copied from the other. That’s because neither
wrote anything. Prentice Hall published both textbooks, and both new chapters
were written by a nameless person known only to its editorial staff. The tiny
differences between the two probably came about in the copyediting process.
Prentice Hall’s bargain-basement thinking does draw back the curtain on the
sordid process of textbook construction, however.
I asked Winkler what he thought of the treatment of the recent past that had
been published under his name. “Well, let me get it off the shelf,” he replied.
He then admitted that he had not read it. Nor had Kelley read the last chapter of
A History, and he had already given up on his claim that Boorstin had done so.
Superficially, these acts by Boorstin, Kelly, Winkler, et al., recall those busy
undergraduates who buy term papers off the Web, slap their names on them,
and hand them in as their own. Both sets of “authors” take credit for the work
of others, who remain nameless but do get paid. A key difference, however, is
that the cheating students usually at least read the material, even though they
didn’t write it. These textbook authors have never even bothered to read the
words that go out over their names. Boorstin, Kelley, and Winkler may be
crediting Saddam Hussein with having nuclear weapons. They may have
misidentified Osama bin Laden as a Jewish rabbi. If so, they’ll be the last to
know.
These passages are not mere revisions of earlier material that the putative
authors actually wrote. This is brand-new history. Moreover, final chapters
surely rank among the most important in the books. They cover important, hotly