Bend, Don’t Break

Jonathan Rees

Fred Watson, "Bookstack," 1992, Northumbria
University, Newcastle, UK. Photo by Randall Stephens.

“Students WILL NOT, and absolutely refuse, to read anything. Give the assignment, and they just ignore it, even if there's a quiz on the reading.”
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- David Bordwell, film historian, University of Wisconsin Madison (via Roger Ebert)

Anyone who has taught in a college classroom over the last five or ten years can feel Professor Bordwell’s pain.  While I imagine the English professors must have it the worst (how can you teach novels if nobody has read the novel?), practically all the historians I know fret constantly about student reading because their discipline is also a literary art.  While it is possible to teach historical facts through lecturing or even just showing films, there is simply no other way for students to learn how to do history themselves except by reading book-length works by great historians.

So what is to be done?  I’ve already suggested that killing the traditional history textbook and replacing it with a smaller number of primary sources on this very blog.  That decision was, in part, a concession to the new realities of student life.  However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I support dumbing down the history curriculum in order prevent mass failure.  I’m of the school that professors should bend, but not break when it comes to reading because no matter what some commission in Tallahassee might think, the liberal arts really are very useful in life.  On the most basic level, graduates will never be able to work in any world of ideas if they can’t read well because that’s how ideas are conveyed.  Therefore, humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

No, I don’t mean re-learning their ABCs.  I’m talking about different kinds of reading.  In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.  You don’t have to quiz them to make sure they’re learning from their reading if you make sure that the reading you assign them is central to your class.

Also, and this may sound like a given but it’s not in academia, you have to make an effort to assign interesting books.  I am not ashamed to say that I think David McCullough is great.  The best reaction I’ve ever gotten in any class was from freshmen non-majors when I assigned David Remnick’s biography of Muhammad Ali.  Certainly, spending time teaching reading skills takes away from the coverage of historical facts, but students will make much better use of those reading skills after they graduate than they ever will of most specific factual details. 

So while times are certainly tough in the history business, all is not lost.  Professors can’t expect all their students to care as much about history as they do, but it is more than reasonable to make them meet you half way.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs mostly about technological and academic labor matters at More or Less Bunk. He's the author of Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life.

Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

Roundup on Writing

From a cafe in Grunerløkka, Oslo

William Zinsser, "Looking for a Model," American Scholar blog, ND

Writing is learned by imitation; we all need models. “I’d like to write like that,” we think at various moments in our journey, mentioning an author whose style we want to emulate. But our best models may be men and women writing in fields different from our own. When I wrote On Writing Well, in 1974, I took as my model a book that had nothing to do with writing or the English language.>>>

PageView Editor, "My Daily Read: [an interview with] Helen Sword," Chronicle, May 2, 2012

Q: What is your greatest criticism of much academic writing?

A. In contrast to Sinclair’s lucid and engaging paper, many academic articles are quite frankly unreadable, not only by disciplinary outsiders but by close colleagues.  Often the problem is simply poor craftsmanship:  perhaps the author has tried to cram three or four major ideas into a single sentence, leaving the reader to do the hard work of disentangling all those nested subordinate clauses.  Another common issue is an excessive allegiance to the discourse of abstraction: it’s not uncommon to find nine, ten, or more spongy abstract nouns (examples: allegiance, discourse, abstraction) cohabiting in a single sentence. The human attention span has trouble coping with that much vagueness.  Stylish academic writers anchor abstract ideas in the physical world, using stories, case studies, metaphors, illustrations, concrete nouns, and vivid verbs, and lots and lots of examples.>>>

Isabel Kaplan, "Classic Literature Isn't Dead: No Ifs, Ands, or Buts," Huff Post Books, June 5, 2012

THIS JUST IN: Contemporary writers are no longer influenced by classic literature -- or so claim a team of mathematicians from Dartmouth and Wisconsin in a recently published paper entitled, "Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature.">>>

Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us," New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.>>>

Maria Popova, "Ray Bradbury on Facing Rejection ... and Being Inspired by Snoopy," Atlantic Monthly, May 21, 2012

Famous advice on writing abounds—Kurt Vonnegut's 8 tips on how to make a great story, David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller's 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck's six pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers. In Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, bring a delightfully refreshing lens to the writing advice genre by asking 30 famous authors and entertainers to each respond to a favorite Snoopy comic strip with a 500-word essay on the triumphs and tribulations of the writing life.>>>

Just the Facts? Revisions to Our Virginia: Past and Present

Brendan Wolfe

Today’s guest post comes from Brendan Wolfe, Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia Virginia. Here Wolfe returns to the Our Virginia textbook—which we posted on here and here. He asks if the revisions to the volume, implemented after a the controversial first version, make it a good enough text.

A little more than a year ago, the Washington Post reported that Virginia's fourth-grade history textbook was full of factual errors. The big news were those two battalions of black Confederates supposedly under the command of Stonewall Jackson, but there were other errors, too, and the resulting kerfuffle put Five Ponds Press on the defensive and almost out of business. More importantly, it persuaded the folks there to involve actual historians in the vetting of their books.

Now a new edition of Our Virginia: Past and Present has been released, and as one might expect, those historians have made it a much better book. But is it good enough? I'm not yet convinced.

To be clear, the facts are all largely in order. But as for the narrative constructed from those facts, it's a real mess. Facts only get us so far, after all. Textbook authors still must do the hard work of telling us what they mean, why they matter, and how we can put them together so that they begin to make sense.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about from Our Virginia:

The book tells us that the English colonist John Smith was "obnoxious" while describing his adversary Powhatan as "a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength." It makes no mention of Powhatan's explicit understanding of power and violence: that he ruled some of his people by force, for example, and that he both helped and fought the English.

Why does this matter? Because on the same page the textbook tells us that without Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas, "Jamestown might have ended up as another 'Lost Colony.'" How? Why? The book doesn't say. And what it does say about the Lost Colony at Roanoke doesn't help, because the author never even hints at why that colony might have failed or that it might have been because of fighting with the local Indians.

In other words, even though the facts are in order, a reader would still be left with the inability to draw any meaningful conclusions.

The author later tells us that the Starving Time at Jamestown occurred because the English settlers did not save enough food. While this is partly true, it doesn't explain why Powhatan and Pocahontas had helped them earlier but not this time. Nor does it acknowledge that food was short for everyone, and that this very shortage was causing conflict between Englishmen and Indians.

Food and conflict. These are two important concepts that are perfectly understandable to fourth-graders but are missing here. To make the point earlier that Powhatan understood power and violence is to be able to make it again now, when it truly bears on the students' understanding of the material. In the meantime, to pay respect to Virginia Indians is to make them actors in this drama. And yet during the Starving Time—this moment when they come so close to expelling the English once and for all—they have completely disappeared!

Last year's textbook controversy focused on fuzzy facts and, to a lesser extent, whether you could find quality information online. But now that many of those facts have been corrected, we are still left with . . . just facts. What do they mean? Why do they matter? Our Virginia is still not up to the task.

iPad for Higher Ed Roundup

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Steve Kolowich, "Relaunching the iPad: Apple drops new iPad apps for digital textbook creation and distribution," Inside Higher Ed, January 20, 2012

NEW YORK CITY -- Apple made its much-anticipated move on the education technology industry on Thursday, announcing a revamped version of its iTunes U platform that could challenge traditional learning management

systems. It also unveiled new tools for creating and distributing low-cost digital textbooks that could speed the pace of e-text adoption.>>>

Dan Miller, "Analysis: Apple's e-textbook push earns mixed grades," Macworld.com, Jan 19, 2012

Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.>>>

Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, "Apple to bolster iPad's educational content," San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 2012

. . . . Apple also wants to empower "self-publishers" to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week's lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.>>>

Jeffrey R. Young, "Apple's New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field," Chronicle of Higher Ed, January 19, 2012

Apple made a splashy entrance into the digital-textbook market on Thursday at an event here at the Guggenheim Museum, but its new build-your-own-textbook tool is likely to lead to more fragmentation in the market rather than becoming a dominant new model.>>>

Larry Abramson, "Apple Carves Inroads In Educational Publishing," NPR, January 19, 2012

Apple today launched a big initiative to update an old standby, the school textbook. In a splashy announcement, the company released new tools to help publishers create digital content for students. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Apple is trying to capitalize on enthusiasm for the iPad in schools and colleges.>>>

History and Myth

Dan Allosso

To follow up on Heather, Jonathan, and Chris's posts—and the general theme that we’ve been developing, about history education, the state of the profession, and writing for the public—I’ve been listening to James Loewen’s lecture series, The Modern Scholar: Rethinking Our Past. Like Lies My Teacher Told Me, (my thoughts on that book here), the lectures focus on bad history taught to high school students, and how we could do it better. Columbus, Civil War & Reconstruction, and the racial “nadir” of the 1890s-1920s are again central, as is Loewen’s critique of “heroification.”

Heroification, Loewen says, is the rendering of pivotal figures in American history (Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Wilson) as two-dimensional icons rather than as complicated humans. This process not only decontextualizes their achievements, it renders them useless as role models. And it feeds a myth-building process that is not only ethnocentric, but that stifles initiative and participation in civic life. At the moment, these are the parts that fascinate me: myth and participation.

The myths supported by mainstream high school texts include American exceptionalism and a subtler, but possibly more problematic, commitment to “Progress.” Loewen demonstrates that both myths are historically inaccurate with dramatic, fact-based counter-narratives. But I wonder whether myths can be defeated with facts? Maybe what is needed is a powerful counter-myth.

When I began thinking seriously about writing, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Terry Davis, author of the classic young adult novel Vision Quest. As the thousands who studied with Terry during his career at Mankato State can attest, Terry is not only a great writing coach, he’s a tireless advocate of serious writing for young adults. “You won’t have to condescend,” Terry said when he invited me to join his YA fiction workshop. So I tried not to, when I wrote Outside the Box. I tried to project myself back, and think about teen alienation from the inside, as I had experienced it myself.

I think it’s significant that Harry Potter never has to kill anybody. But what type of myth—what type of worldview—does this give to a generation growing up in a nation at war? Like the myth of Progress hidden in our high school histories, does it make the real world more or less comprehensible for young adults? Loewen says students are bored by history and sense that they’re being lied to. Unlike Harry Potter, their history teachers are not supposed to be presenting escapist fiction. But if Loewen is right, it’s not at the level of facts, but at the level of myth that high school history really operates. So what about alienation?

Young adults are expected to rebel, for a little while, from the society of their parents. But typically, they’re then expected to accept the authority of the people and institutions they had rebelled against. Their ultimate reward is that they will inherit that authority, and the cycle will be complete. This myth of cyclical youth rebellion is based on the myth of progress. What happens to it, if we admit there are limits to growth? If society’s current behaviors are unsustainable, should we be reassuring ourselves and our children that their alienation is just a phase that they’ll outgrow?

What does this imply for those of us who want to write history for young adults? Are there counter-myths that can be useful? The myth of “the little guy against faceless power” resonates in our culture, from the Terminator movies to internet conspiracy theories. Historians on the right and the left have built their narratives on this structure—it’s no accident that Glenn Beck hides his “let the corporate overlords do what they want” message in a swirl of populist rhetoric. Can this counter-myth be used to make space for young Americans to challenge authority on something more than a generational-hormonal basis?

All myths leave out detail and complexity. Can a historian work at the mythic level, without betraying history? America is said to be exceptional in the great distance between what our professional historians understand about our past, and what the general public believes. Is this because—unlike other cultures whose myths reside in shared ethnicity or religion or some other institution—Americans are held together by their mythical history? Should we distinguish even more than we do, between historians and people who write for the public?

Jump Right in, the Water's Fine

Jonathan Rees

In the new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society, Allan Kulikoff makes a series of suggestions about how to improve history education at the higher ed level. One of the problems he cites is that:

Historians have uncovered entirely too many social facts to digest. The glut in scholarship sets the stage for increasingly impenetrable survey textbooks, puts ever-longer lists of must-read books before graduate students, narrows the focus of dissertation research, and increases the flood of unreadable monographs.

There seems to be a budding consensus on the textbook part of that complaint, as no less a personage as David McCullough recently unloaded on them in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all.

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."

I would take issue with the notion that the facts in most textbooks are comic in their political correctness, since McCullough and I clearly have different priorities. Nonetheless, we historians should probably all agree with the notion that fitting everything we want students to know and think about history between the covers of a single volume has become increasingly difficult in the last forty years, at least since the advent of the New Social History (which is, of course, now rather old). Textbook authors have to make choices, and it is inevitable that those of use who assign their books will disagree with many of the choices that they make.

While Kulikoff proposes a series of interesting suggestions attacking the entire crisis in history education (which I’ll let you read yourself by getting a hold of the JHS June issue), I have a modest proposal of my own to take care of the textbook problem: don’t assign one. No, I’m not kidding. I ditched the textbook in my survey class last semester for the first time and was delighted by the results.

While I’d like to credit a prominent history blogger from the northern part of my state for giving me the idea, the truth is that I had been thinking about killing my textbook for years, but never had the nerve to try it until I read that she had already done so. I had been switching textbooks about once a year for years and was unsatisfied with every text I tried before I started assigning primary sources instead. It’s not as if all textbooks are as badly written as McCullough suggests they are (although some clearly are), it was that none of them emphasized the same facts and themes that I did in class. I wanted a textbook that compliments my teaching rather than one that provides a competing narrative. Now I build my own reading list based upon what I teach already and have more time left to teach other skills besides memorization.

What did my students think? I did a special evaluation toward the end of the course and they seemed to like it just as much as I did. Yes, this might be expected when you’re giving them less reading, but I like to compare my new syllabus to the Sugar Act of 1764: I assign fewer pages than I used to, but I enforce the reading of the pages that I still assign much more stringently. Deep in my heart I knew that nobody read the textbook before, but now I see the documents I assign and teach get directly referenced on the best student essays. By pouring fewer facts into their heads, I’m convinced that fewer of them are coming out on the other side.

Why admit to such pedagogical heresies in a public forum?

I’m convinced that if more of us no-textbook professors make ourselves known, more historians will join the bandwagon. I was once afraid to go with my gut, but I’m through living in fear of the unknown. Just because you’ve assigned a textbook in the past (the same way that your teachers assigned you a textbook and their teachers assigned them a textbook), you do not have to assign a textbook in the future. Think of the students in your survey classes who will never take another history class. Do you really want their last memory of our discipline to be an overly-long, dull book without an argument and written by a committee?

If you’re happy with your survey textbook, then disregard this post. If not, then I say jump right in, the water’s fine.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo. He blogs about history and other matters at More or Less Bunk.

Eating My Words (while Uncovering My Eyes)

Heather Cox Richardson

A while back, when the Texas curriculum flap was in full swing, I wrote about the Texas legislature’s potential undercutting of the curriculum committee that was pushing Texas history standards so far to the right. The legislature had voted to permit schools to spend money allotted for curriculum materials on non-textbook sources. That might actually help, rather than hurt, American history, I wrote, as schools turned to the free primary sources available on the web rather than being tied to the textbook choices of the radicals on the curriculum committee.

Today I fess up to my naiveté. There was a completely different way to approach this funding change, and it’s now underway. It is a way that raises troubling educational issues, but also, perhaps, even more disturbing political ones.

On Wednesday evening, former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee announced his new educational company, “Learn Our History.” The company’s mission is to “combat major shortcomings in current methods of teaching American history.” It claims it will tell “America’s most influential stories, without the filters or biases that too often infiltrate history and social studies classes across the country today.” The company’s first product is a new video series of cartoons about American history: “The Time Travel Academy Video Series.” The series features time-traveling teenagers who visit important events in the nation’s past.

Governor Huckabee’s promotional materials begin with a full-throated attack on history teachers that echoes the Texas curriculum committee. History today is “force-fed” to students “through dry text books, monotonous lectures and boring lessons,” the website announces. Worse, “our children's classes and learning materials are often filled with misrepresentations, including historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness.” Huckabee’s walk-on website character amplifies: “When it comes to American history, our nation is facing an epidemic. Schools across the country have turned their backs on our children by distorting facts, imposing political biases, and changing the message behind the important lessons of our history. As a result, our children aren’t learning what makes America great.”

The video series will combat this travesty with “unbiased” history, promising “to correct the ‘blame America first’ attitude prevalent in today’s teaching.” It celebrates America’s greatness and recognizes and celebrates “faith, religion and the role of God in America's founding and making our country the greatest place on Earth.” The first video available is “The Reagan Revolution.” The second is about World War II.

It should come as no surprise that the lead scholarly advisor to the series is Larry Schweikart, author of 48 Liberal Lies about American History, and A Patriot’s History of the United States, one of Glenn Beck’s favorite history books.

So my sunny optimism that the Texas curriculum funding law would bring primary sources and honest historical inquiry into Texas classrooms was probably naïve.

But now my training as a political historian makes me see something more than an educational culture war in this struggle. Here’s why: The videos are designed partly for the huge Christian homeschooling market, but also for classroom use. Apparently,* they cost $19.95 (plus $3.95 shipping and handling). The website promises that the company envisions more than seventy-five of them.

If they do become a staple in Texas schools, which make up the nation’s largest curriculum market, Governor Huckabee’s new company looks to do pretty well.

Governor Huckabee, of course, is a current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

While I hasten to say that I can’t imagine that anyone in the Texas legislature foresaw the way this has played out, doesn’t the Texas curriculum law, plus the new video series, plus Governor Huckabee’s candidacy equal a situation in which public school funds can be funneled to a specific political candidate?

Kind of flies in the face of the company’s purported mission to keep public schools from “imposing political biases,” doesn’t it?
____________

* The cost is a little hard to figure out from the website, and calling the company telephone number didn’t yield a person.

More on Our Virginia: Past and Present

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Harper's Magazine includes some of the findings of a "Report on the Review of Virginia’s Textbook Adoption Process, the Virginia Studies Textbook Our Virginia: Past and Present, and Other Selected United States History Textbooks." Heather blogged about the controversy surrounding the adoption of the textbook and some of its pseudohistory here. Now we return to it with more on the text's creative or unknowing anachronisms . . . I didn't see anything in the report about John Quincy Adams being a founding father.

The reviewers of the text included: Christopher Einolf (DePaul University); Mary Miley Theobald (Retired: Virginia Commonwealth University); Brent Tarter (Retired: Library of Virginia); Ronald Heinemann (Retired: Hampden-Sydney College); Lauranett L. Lee (Curator of African American History, Virginia Historical Society).

A note to any future textbook writers out there: Check your sources and then check them again. Or, at least have sources. Don't make things up.

I include below a sampling of the official critique. The items in quotes are from Our Virginia:

“In 1607 Queen Elizabeth sent three ships to found Jamestown, Virginia.” That would have been difficult, since Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and neither she nor her successor, King James, “sent” any ships. They approved when a private company, the Virginia Company, sent ships to Jamestown, and no doubt King James approved when the colonists astutely named the town after him.

“They had been terribly persecuted and had seen friends killed.” I would like to know the source for this statement. I’ve never heard of Pilgrims being killed in England. Mostly they left England because they wanted to get away from the bad influences of the established Anglican Church. The statement seems over-the-top, but I can’t prove or disprove.

“Very few people in colonial America could read . . .” This is a myth. The overwhelming majority of white colonists were literate. In New England, literacy rates were higher than elsewhere because there were more schools and there was an emphasis on learning to read the Bible, but even in Virginia and other Southern colonies, almost all white men and even most white women could read in the eighteenth century. Percentages change over time, always growing larger, but even in the seventeenth century, about 60% of men in Virginia could read and about a quarter of the women. Figures are higher for the northern colonies. At no time in American history did “very few people” know how to read (unless one is talking about African Americans or Native Americans).

“. . . until you realize that it hurt America’s tea makers, whose tea already had a heavy tax.” America didn’t have any tea makers; the climate isn’t suited to growing tea. American had merchants who sold smuggled tea, avoiding the tax. Again, I understand it is hard to explain a complicated issue in simplistic terms, but this treatment of the Tea Act isn’t accurate.

“Washington and French General Lafayette inspect troops before the Battle of Morristown in New Jersey.” First of all, there was no Battle of Morristown. Morristown was where Washington and his troops wintered in 1777 (January 6- May 28). Second, Lafayette was not a general until July 31, 1777 and didn’t even meet George Washington until August 10, 1777, long after Morristown, so they wouldn’t have been reviewing any troops.

“Cyrus McCormick’s young grandson was there on the day the reaper was tested.” (then the book quotes the grandson’s “eyewitness ” account). Since Cyrus McCormick was 22 in 1831 when he first tested his reaper, it is unlikely his grandson was present. The reason this grandson’s account is quoted is to “prove” that a black slave, Jo Anderson, helped invent the reaper. While the slave helped with all the farm work, including building a reaper, he should not be credited as a co-inventor, as some Politically Correct people would like. It is a serious mistake to title this section “Anderson and McCormick’s Reaper.” It was Cyrus McCormick’s reaper. http://www.virginialiving.com/articles/lion-of-the- hour/index.html

“The Quakers, a religious group, believed that all people were created by God.” A rather unnecessary sentence, don’t you think? What religious group does not believe that all people were created by God? It doesn’t say anything about the Quakers’ beliefs. It might be better to note that they were Christian pacifists who believed all people were equal, even women, Indians, and blacks.

“Evenings were spent playing cards or checkers, writing letters to loved ones, reading old worn newspapers, and playing baseball by torchlight.” That would be some trick, playing baseball by torchlight, since you couldn’t see to catch a ball. Torches give off almost no light beyond a few feet from the flame. I have never seen any mention of playing baseball by torchlight.

“Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the South’s largest cities. It was an important railroad hub . . .” Yes, Atlanta was a railroad hub, but it was one of the smaller cities in the South. In the 1860 census, Atlanta ranks 99th among American cities, with a population of 9,000. The South had many, many cities larger than Atlanta, including Baltimore at 212,000, New Orleans at 169,000, Louisville at 68,000, Richmond at 38,000 (25th), etc. Georgia alone had three cities larger than little Atlanta: Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt

Map showing Fort Necessity (which is spelled wrong as Neccesity) locates the fort in the wrong state. Fort Necessity is in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. Fort Duquesne is also in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. (The text accurately states that Fort Duquesne is near Pittsburgh, but the map positions it in Ohio.)

St. Louis is always written as St., not Saint.>>>