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.

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.

Conclusions are not always pleasant.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.

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.

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.