I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites.

So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

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

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.

People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

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