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.

Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the west.

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

Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.

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

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

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