Bailey’s publisher pressed him to include more women and African Americans
in The American Pageant.^61
Regardless of the direction of the input, publishers are in charge. “They
didn’t want famous people, because we’d be more tractable,” Mark Lytle told
me, explaining why a major publisher had sought out him and James Davidson,
relative unknowns. Two widely published authors told me that publishers tore
up textbook contracts with them because they didn’t like the political slant of
their manuscripts. “We have arguments,” one editor told me bluntly. “We
usually win.”
Very different conditions apply to secondary works in history, where the
intended readership typically includes professional historians. Authors of
book-length secondary works know that publishers and journal editors hire
professional historians to evaluate manuscripts, so they write for other
historians from the beginning. Writers also know that other historians will
review their monographs after publication, and their reputation will be made
or broken by those reviews in the historical journals.
With such different readerships, it is natural for secondary works and
textbooks to be very different from each other. Textbook authors need not
concern themselves unduly with what actually happened in history, since
publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to sell their books. This
emphasis should hardly be surprising: the requirement to take American history
originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign early in this century.^62
Publishers start the pitch on their outside covers, where nationalist titles such
as The Challenge of Freedom and Land of Promise are paired with traditional
patriotic icons: eagles, Independence Hall, the Stars and Stripes, and the Statue
of Liberty. Four of the six new books in my sample display the American flag
on their covers; the other two use red, white, and blue for their titles and
authors.^63 Publishers market the books as tools for helping students to
“discover” our “common beliefs” and “appreciate our heritage.” No publisher
tries to sell a textbook with the claim that it is more accurate than its
competitors.
Textbook authors also bear their student readers in mind, to a degree. From
my own experience I know that imagining what one’s readers need is an
important part of the process of writing a history textbook. Some textbook
authors are high school teachers, but most are college professors who know