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.

Many Americans have never owned a book, and I'm not talking about because of the recent digital revolution. I'm talking about before there even was a digital revolution.

Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual

I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the people who did not write them; so it's a new definition of "author."

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

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

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.