The only photograph of troops in Triumph of the American Nation shows them
happily surrounding President Johnson when he visited the American base at
Cam Ranh Bay during the war.
This is an outrage, and there is no excuse for it. Joy Hakim shows we can do
better in her textbook A History of US, intended for about fifth grade. She
includes the police chief shooting the terrified man, another image of a guard
threatening a Vietnamese POW with a knife, a photograph of a town destroyed
by “our side,” and the most famous image of the My Lai massacre.
Surprisingly, Hakim also gives her readers the image of the little girl running
naked down Highway 1. This is surprising because textbook publishers
typically follow the rule of “no nudity”; as one editor told me, “in elementary
books cows don’t have udders.” Yet her series has been a bestseller—perhaps
because it also reads better than most standard textbooks.
What about their prose? Sadly, most textbook authors also leave out all the
memorable quotations of the era. No textbook quotes the trademark cadences
of Martin Luther King Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war,
reproduced at the head of this chapter.^17 Even more famous was the dissent of