51 M. P., “Texas Schoolbook Massacre: 5200 Errors Found in 10 History
Books,” Publishers Weekly, 3/2/1992, 11. Not all 5,200 were errors, and many
errors were trivial or arguable.
52 Some observers do think Libya simply paid up to end the episode and
resume normal relations with Western nations, but this is a minority position,
and I doubt that Boorstin and Kelley meant to take it. Cf., “Pan Am Flight 103,”
Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 , 10/2006.
53 Momentarily, I concluded that the hireling deep in the bowels of Holt who
proposed this preposterous project had heard of but never seen Benét’s epic
poem and imagined it to be a page long, like many other poems. But no, the
title is italicized, not quoted, as befits a book-length poem, not a shorter one.
54 Interviews, 12/1987. Gilbert Sewall, “Social Studies Textbooks: A View
from the Publishers,” Social Studies Review, no. 5 (Summer 1990): 14, takes a
darker view of publisher influence: “Schoolbook authors have little or no
control over their product.” Frances FitzGerald suggests I am wrong to believe
the textbooks’ authors; certainly the authors might be ashamed to confess to
editorial interference if they had succumbed to it. Later in his interview with
me, one textbook author detailed several editorial suggestions, contradicting
his earlier statement. We can conclude, however, that these authors
unquestionably judged their relationship with their publishers harmonious.
55 John Garraty, interview, 11/1987. Garraty, to his credit, soon afterward
learned about what Alfred W. Crosby Jr. calls “The Columbian exchange” and
made it the first entry in his 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About
American History (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 3.
56 James Davidson and Mark Lytle, After the Fact (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1992), 106-11. A History of the Republic does mention one incident, smallpox
in Mexico City, in sentence fragments so tiny that the mention does not even get
into the index.
57 Tyson-Bernstein, “The Academy’s Contribution to the Impoverishment of
America’s Textbooks,” 194, and “Remarks to the AERA Textbook SIG,” 9;
Thomas Bailey, senior writer of one of the textbooks in my sample, wrote that
a successful book, which The American Pageant surely has been, “would
actually hurt me with some of my peers” (The American Pageant Revisited,
180). My home institution, the University of Vermont, separates “scholarship”
from what it calls “pedagogical works” and discounts the latter. See Black,