My history teachers have been complaining a lot lately about how new history textbooks are being put together with each chapter written by a separate author. Apparently, this can lead to strange tonal shifts and/or confusing chronology.
So, the teachers say one of two things to us students: “Well, I had you buy this zillion dollar textbook, but we won’t be reading much of it” or “Well, I didn’t want you to buy the really awful, really expensive textbook, so here are a zillion paper copies of other chapters from other books.”
How are textbooks are put together? And is the new trend? Thanks.
It’s a long-standing tradition on books covering a broad range of topics to use a variety of experts. A company producing a world history book could (and should) consult experts in different cultures, time periods, and regions of the world. In many cases, it’s simply easier to have each section/chapter written by a subject matter expert than to have a single writer try to gather all the material–and you generate a lot less errors that way, too.
It’s the job of the editor(s) to pull this disparate material together and give it a single voice and style. Some editors work harder at it than others. I’ve written for a couple of encyclopedias. One (a computer encyclopedia) used my text almost verbatim. The other (the World Book) did pretty extensive editing. They didn’t introduce any errors, and I got paid the same either way, so it really didn’t matter to me.
I highly recommend you check out the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong” by James Loewen. It is an extremely well-written book about the many problems with how history textbooks are created and used in the classroom. It is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.
The chapters in my Russian history textbook were written by different authors, and they’re supposed to read that way. Aside from issues of style, each chapter reads as though it were written by a different writer. FTR, it was $25 new.
My history professor’s feeling is that anyone can look up names, dates and places in any good reference book, but it’s the concepts that are important.
A bigger problem is the increasing blandness. Afraid of irritating anyone, anywhere, in any way, they’ve resorted to touchy-feely crap and whitewashing history. Which is foolish - the entire point of history is that it’s a bloody and exciting taes of greed, sex, murder, war, and power!
Feynman wrote a fascinating, frightening essay on how math and science textbooks were chosen and written. This is somewhat of a tangent, and it’s obviously dated, but my point is that textbooks are often badly-written and not vetted in any meaningful way. The whole process is political and driven by a few small groups who aren’t elected or otherwise chosen in any rational way. I don’t know what qualifications you need to have to write textbooks, but I strongly suspect that you don’t get grant money for teaching or writing for students. Especially students who aren’t in college or postgraduate studies.
That has never been my experience. In fact, my high school AP US History text was surprisingly open about that stuff, and quite well-written to boot. I can’t imagine what’s led you to the belief that textbooks are “white-washed” nowadays; in fact, compared to the stade days of yore (in which it seemed that texts preferred to inspire bland patriotism), history textbooks seem to me considerably more amenable to critical thinking about the subject.
In college, of course, there’s a little more competition in this area, and I can’t imagine any college textbook expunging “inappropriate” material.
Can you give some examples of his “often inaccurate” writing? I’m really asking here - I’ve only read the one book of his and it seemed to me to be meticulously researched and documented.
Im taking American History since 1890 right now, and a week after class started we all figured out that our Prof. edited the book. Indeed it is done in seperate sections, each with their own contributor (which then goes and presents articles from the given time period). I found my self reading one non-assigned section, and it turns out the Prof. himself wrote that section. --Can’t wait to see how he will handle that section, and if he “disagrees with the author on this point”
It all boils down to this: There are two types of history books. The first kind agrees with my perceptions of how things happened and which side was the “good guys” at any particular point in history. The other kind is a bunch of biased twaddle.
