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.

I'm looking forward to the future, which is a good thing, because it's coming.

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

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.

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.

Very few college professors want high school graduates in their history class who are simply "gung ho" and "rah-rah" with regard to everything the United States has ever done, have never thought critically in their life, don't know the meaning of the word "historiography" and have never heard of it. They think that history is something you're supposed to memorize and that's about it. That's not what high school, or what college history teachers want.