There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

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.

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

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 pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline.

Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks, which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of constant progress. Including ideas would make history contingent: things could go either way, and have on occasion. The 'right' people, armed with the 'right' ideas, have not always won. When they didn't, the authors would be in the embarrassing position of having to disapprove of an outcome in the past. Including ideas would introduce uncertainty. This is not textbook style.

Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.