Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.

All of the common core standards stuff about critical reading and critical thinking and so on can only be positive.

History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.

The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don't read.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.