organizations and delicate adoption procedures as American history textbooks.
To be sure, math and biology books also err. But only about history and social
studies do writers actually ask, “Can textbooks have scholarly integrity?”^96
Only in history is accuracy so political.
Consider the example of black soldiers in the Civil War. Even in the 1930s
the facts about their contribution were plain for all to see in the primary
sources and even the textbooks of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Depression-era textbooks omitted those facts, not because they were unknown
but because including important acts by African Americans did not “mirror the
attitudes of [white] society” during the nadir of race relations. Thus, to
understand how textbooks in the 1930s presented the Civil War, we do not look
at the history of the 1860s, but at the society of the 1930s. Likewise, to
understand how textbooks today present the Civil War, the Pilgrims, or
Columbus, we do not look at the 1860s, 1620s, or 1490s, but at our time. What
distortions of history does our society cause? We must not fool ourselves that
the process of distorting history has magically stopped. We must not
congratulate ourselves that our society now treats everyone fairly and
manifests attitudes that allow accurate interpretations of the past. We must not
pretend that, unlike all previous generations, we write true history. Authors of
high school history textbooks often don’t even try, as we have seen. When
parents and teachers do not demand from publishers and schools the same
effort to present accurate history that we expect in other disciplines, we
become part of the problem.
For that matter, many history textbooks published in the present are not
really products of our time at all. Chapter 5 told of the nadir of American race
relations, between 1890 and 1940. In that period, not only did we slide
backward in race relations, we also developed a deeply biased understanding
of what was then our recent past—Reconstruction (1866-77), the confused
period that followed (1877-90), and the nadir itself. Chapter 6 showed how
John Brown went insane after 1890, but Brown’s sanity was not the only
casualty of the nadir. Interpretations concocted during the nadir still affect what
textbooks say today about the Grant administration, Woodrow Wilson, and
even Christopher Columbus. In the nadir, African Americans seemed so
“obviously” inferior that most whites could not imagine that President Grant,
the “Stalwarts,” and most Republican officeholders in the South had really
cared about racial equality. Logically, it followed that they must have had some