only a few high school or junior high school students personally. Interviews
with textbook authors revealed that their imagining of what students need is a
strange process. Something about the enterprise of writing a high school
American history textbook converts historians into patriots. One author told me
that she was the single parent of an eleven-year-old girl when she started work
on her textbook. She “wanted to write a book that Samantha would be proud
of.” I empathized with this desire and told of my own single parenting of a
daughter about the same age. Further conversation made clear, however, that
this author did not simply mean a book her daughter would respect and enjoy.
Rather, she wanted a book that would make her daughter feel good about
America, a very different thing.^64
Other textbook authors have shared similar comments with me. They want to
produce good citizens, by which they mean people who take pride in their
country. Somehow authors feel they must strap on the burden of transmitting
and defending Western civilization. Sometimes there was almost a touch of
desperation in their comments—sort of an après moi le déluge. Authors can
feel that they get only one shot at these children; if they do not reach them now,
America’s future might be jeopardized. In turn, this leads to a feeling of
selfimportance—that one is on the front line of our society, helping the United
States continue to grow strong. Not only textbook authors feel this way:
historians and history teachers commonly cite their role in building good
citizens to justify what they do. In “A Proud Word for History,” Allan Nevins
waxes euphoric over “school texts that told of Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge,
and the Alamo.” He lauds history’s role in making a nation strong.
“Developing in the young such traits as character, morals, ethics, and good
citizenship,” according to Richard Gross, former president of the National
Council for the Social Studies, “are the reasons for studying history and the
social sciences.”^65 When we were writing our Mississippi history my
coauthors and I felt the same way—that we might improve our state and its
citizens by imparting knowledge and changing attitudes in its next generation.
When the authors of American history textbooks have their chance to
address the next generation at large, however, even those who in their
monographs and private conversations are critical of some aspects of our
society seem to want only to maintain America rather than change it. One
textbook author, Carol Berkin, began her interview with me by saying, “As a
historian, I am a feminist socialist.”^66 My jaw dropped, because her textbook