about fifteen years earlier, he had revised and written several chapters of it. “I
did it for the money,” he said, “ten thousand dollars for a few months of part-
time work.”^50
The editor quoted at the head of the chapter implies no one is the loser from
this practice, because the freelancers “pick things up pretty quickly, and in a
couple of days, they’re up on the Civil War.” Historians who have spent
decades researching that war may not agree that it can be mastered in two
days, however. Hiring neophyte stand-ins to do authors’ work may help explain
the sometimes astonishing mistakes that textbooks commit. A notorious
example was the claim in a 1990-era textbook, “President Truman easily
settled the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb.”^51 Truman’s action
certainly came as a surprise to Dwight Eisenhower, who campaigned for the
presidency in 1952 with the slogan, “I will go to Korea.” Similar errors dot
history textbooks from start to finish. Boorstin and Kelley tell us, for instance,
that one reason Columbus sailed to the Americas from the Canary Islands,
rather than from Spain, was that “the Canaries were on the same latitude as
Japan, so if he went due west he thought he would arrive where he wanted to
be.” Actually Seville, Spain’s leading port at the time, lies precisely at the
midpoint of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. The Canaries lie far to the south, as
a glance at a globe reveals. To take another example, The American Journey
claims that “Maggie Lena” “was the first American woman to serve as a bank
president,” leaving out Maggie Walker’s last name. One of Journey’s three
putative authors is James McPherson, specialist in Civil War African
American history. He would never have written—or even read—that passage
and allowed such a mistake to stand.
The anonymous author of the last chapter of The American Pageant didn’t
have to be a specialist to avoid the following egregious error about the 2004
election:
On election day, Bush nailed down a decisive victory. His
three-pronged strategy of emphasizing taxes, terror, and moral
values paid off handsomely. He posted the first popular vote
majority in more than a decade, 60,639,281 to Kerry’s
57,355,978, with a commanding advantage in the Electoral
College, 286 to 252.Commanding advantage indeed! The mere switch of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes,