history texts during the last half century has resulted in history textbooks which
are boring to students.” “Objections [to The American Adventure]” (Longview,
TX: Educational Research Analysts, n.d.), 4. We part company in our proposed
solutions, however, for the only emotion that Gabler and his allies seem to
want to add is pride.
14 “It’s a Great Country,” sung with pride by a high school choir from Webster
Groves, Missouri, in a CBS News video, Sixteen in Webster Groves (NY:
Carousel Films, 1966).
15 In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Harcourt Brace renamed this last one
Triumph of the American Nation. This is the Rambo approach to history: we
may have lost the war in Southeast Asia, but we’ll win it on the book jackets!
16 James Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American
History Textbooks,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 627. Essays such
as Axtell’s, which review college-level textbooks, rarely appear in history
journals. Almost never are high school textbooks reviewed.
17 Twelve were in my first sample for the first edition of this book, six in my
second, for this revision. Two books, Discovering American History and The
American Adventure, are “inquiry textbooks,” composed of maps, illustrations,
and extracts from primary sources such as diaries and laws, all woven together
by an overarching narrative. Briefly popular in the mid-1970s, these books
were meant to invite students to “do” history themselves. The American Way,
Land of Promise, The United States—A History of the Republic, American
History, and The American Tradition are traditional high school narrative
history textbooks in my earlier sample. American Adventures, Life and
Liberty, and The Challenge of Freedom, also in my original sample, were
intended for junior high students but were often used by “slow” senior high
classes. Triumph of the American Nation and The American Pageant were
often used in “advanced placement” high school history courses. The newer six
books included a descendant of Triumph of the American Nation retitled Holt
American Nation, the newest Pageant, A History of the United States by
Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, The Americans, now listing
Gerald Danzer and four other authors, Pathways to the Present, listing four
authors, and a seventh-grade book, The American Journey, which I included
because a McGraw-Hill representative urged me to, impressed with the three
outstanding historians listed as its authors. Sales figures are trade secrets, but
the five current high school textbooks I examined are probably the biggest