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

It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit... No one likes to think of him or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

Textbooks are written in an oracular monotone, so that they claim to be true and important.

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

Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook.

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time.

Textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.