Altbach et al., eds., Textbooks in American Society (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1991), 94-97; interviews with publishing executives; AP-
USHIST discussion list ([email protected]), 12/2006.
32 Tyson-Bernstein, “Remarks to the AERA Textbook SIG,” 5.
33 Lynne Cheney, Tyrannical Machines (Washington, D.C.: National
Endowment for the Humanities, 1990), 12.
34 Okay, it’s a joke, but recall the right answer from Ch. 4: November, 1811 , at
Tippecanoe.
35 Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant Revisited: Recollections of a
Stanford Historian (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1982), 192.
36 Quoted in Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History in the
United States, 39.
37 Marshall, “With a Little Help from Some Friends,” 66.
38 Perhaps someone somewhere has produced an unusual textbook for general
American history. The closest I know is Howard Zinn’s People’s History of
the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), sometimes called an
anti-textbook. For other suggestions, see notes to the Afterword.
39 Ironically, the closest things to “niche” books publishers now produce are
the separate editions of their textbook packages that some still put out for
Texas to accommodate its highly politicized adoption pressures. Loewen v.
Turnipseed offers a precedent that might help minority plaintiffs open markets
in big-city school districts under majority control, if alternative textbooks
existed. The power of Texas is parallel to “The Myth of the Southern Box
Office,” described by Thomas R. Cripps in J. C. Curtis and L. J. Gould, eds.,
The Black Experience in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970),
116-44. For decades Hollywood producers were afraid to offend Southern
movie-theater owners, who, they thought, controlled one-third of the market.
However, in recent years the situation in Texas has improved, as told in the
Afterword.
40 Robert Darnton, “The Good Old Days,” New York Review of Books,
5/16/1991, 47.
41 Hillel Black, The American Schoolbook (New York: Morrow, 1967), 49-
52.