I often suggest in workshops that if you have 30 students in your American History course in 11th grade, or whatever grade level, that you maybe triple them up. You put, and have them choose, let's say 11 different Native American cultures. Maybe you give them a list of 15 and they choose 11 of those 15 so that they have some choice in the matter.

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

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

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

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.

As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.

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.