The American Schoolbook, 39; Sewall, “Social Studies Textbooks: A View
from the Publishers,” 14; and Matthew Downey, “Speaking of Textbooks,” in
David Elliott and Arthur Woodward, eds., Textbooks and Schooling in the
United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press NSSE Yearbook, 1981).
58 The American Historical Review, the principal journal of the American
Historical Association; Social Education, the principal journal of the National
Council for the Social Studies; and Reviews in American History do not
review high school textbooks. In what it considers a major innovation, The
Journal of American History recently began to review college textbooks.
Most other history journals have no policy about reviewing textbooks, but I
could locate only one review of any of the twelve books here studied, in The
History Teacher.
59 Many authors do not get much credit for writing textbooks even from their
own publishers. In Scott, Foresman’s advertisements for Land of Promise, one
cannot make out the authors’ names without a magnifying glass. Prentice Hall’s
ads for The United States—A History of the Republic never mention the
authors at all. Sometimes authors’ names are not even listed on the book
covers. For authors who didn’t write “their” textbooks, this lack of credit or
blame is perfectly fair.
60 Mark Lytle interview, 11/1993.
61 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991), 258-59; Bailey, The American Pageant Revisited, 192-95.
62 Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History in the United States,
6, 10-11, and 56-62.
63 The two inquiry texts take a different tack. Discovering American History
offers a collage of old photographs. While clearly celebrating our past, with
prominent images of Abraham Lincoln and other great leaders, its arrangement
also suggests that photographs can be materials of history and thus implies an
inquiry approach. The American Adventure goes partway, showing black-and-
white photographs of Lincoln, Indian houses, and other buildings and faces.
However, a graphic designer merely arranged them to look good and
surrounded them with the red, white, and blue.
64 What’s wrong with that, some might ask. The next chapter, which describes
the effects on students of this kind of history, suggests one answer.