Reviewing a high-school book in world history

Human Heritage: A World History
1999. 712 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-02-663895-9.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 936 Eastwind Drive, Westerville, Ohio 43081.
(Glencoe/McGraw-Hill is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies.)

Are We Having Fun Yet?

William J. Bennetta

William Weber said that the 1995 Human Heritage didn't deserve to carry the subtitle A World History, because it paid little attention to anything besides the history of the West. He also found that it was pedagogically obsolete, that it made little effort to help students build their intellectual skills, and that too many of the exercises presented to students were fanciful or unrealistic or unworkable.

Charles Paul said that Human Heritage lacked coherence and continuity. He saw some commendable passages here and there, but he observed that the book's text was degraded by serious omissions, by many errors of fact, and by a style of prose that blended "peculiar diction, muddled phrasing, and a propensity to raise questions without answering them." The 1995 Human Heritage, Paul said, represented "an attempted compromise between tradition and faddism," and the attempt was a failure.

The 1999 version of Human Heritage is, for all practical purposes, interchangeable with the 1995. The text and illustrations that appeared in the 1995 book have been recycled, virtually unchanged. Obvious errors remain uncorrected, incomprehensible passages remain incomprehensible, meaningless sentences remain meaningless, and the book still is laden with traditional fictions and faddish pretensions that are downright silly.

On the traditional side, for instance, Human Heritage is still peddling Christian religious lore -- including the notion that Jesus was born in Bethlehem -- as history [see note 1, below].

To comply with current fads, Human Heritage continues to offer multi-culti absurdities, such as the fancy that the Australian aborigines "have always lived in harmony with their environment" [note 2]. Ugh!

Instead of rectifying the many defects of content and presentation that made the 1995 Human Heritage unacceptable, Glencoe's writers and editors have devoted their talents to decorating the 1999 book with new gewgaws. Some of these are "Multimedia Activity" items, including four in which the Glencoe writers cynically pretend to give instructions for finding information on the Internet [note 3].

Most of the new decorations, however, are boxed items that have been tossed into the page-margins, under the rubrics "Then . . . & Now" and "Fun Facts." A "Fun Facts" box on page 353, for example, tells us that Mongols entirely destroyed Kiev, and that the only building which was left standing was the cathedral of Saint Sophia. Reading the "Fun Facts" box on page 450, we see that Martin Luther had a close call with a lightning bolt, and that this led him to abandon the study of law and to enter a monastery.

Are we having fun yet?

• In 43 cases the page in the 1999 version is identical with the corresponding page in the 1995.

• In 14 cases the page in the 1999 version has gained a new "Then . . . & Now" or "Fun Facts" gewgaw. Otherwise, it is identical with the corresponding page in the 1995.

• In two cases the page in the 1999 version has been redesigned, and a small amount of old material has been discarded, so that the page can carry an Internet gewgaw.

• On page 600 a map's color scheme has been altered, and a photograph has been replaced. In the 1995 version, page 600 had a photo of a monument in Kenya. Now it has a photo of a space vehicle.

• On page 650, in the page-margin, a small photo of an artilleryman has been replaced by a "Fun Facts" box: In 1998, we learn, McDonald's had 15 fast-food stands in Moscow, and these were selling "more than a million orders of french fries each month." Page 650 also has four new paragraphs of text about economic turmoil in Russia and eastern Europe, along with a revised "Section Review."

• Page 652 displays new text about "World Challenges." This page has also acquired a "Fun Facts" box which reports that Kuwait's annual production of petroleum is about 60 million metric tons, and Saudi Arabia's is about 320 million.

After I finished my formal sampling of pages, I did some casual reading of the 1999 Human Heritage. As I toured its fun-filled pages, I noticed three more things that must be remarked here:

• This book is loaded with illustrations that are just worthless. There are scores of them -- meaningless reproductions of pictures, with nothing to indicate when, where or why the pictures were made, or by whom. Many of these illustrations appear in page-margins and bear tiny captions such as "Painting of Mycenaean Woman," "Painting of Roman Couple," "Painting of Philip II," "Painting of Legionary," "Painting of Augustine," "Painting of Ivan the Great," "Painting of Copernicus," "Painting of Renaissance Merchant," and so on. Is that "Painting of Copernicus" an authentic portrait? Is it a fanciful picture created as an illustration for a 19th-century romance? Is it something that was invented for Glencoe by a commercial artist? There is no way to tell. Glencoe's staff evidently wanted to make sure that these illustrations wouldn't convey any historical information at all. Still, the "Painting of" illustrations are not entirely lacking in significance, because some of them have erroneous captions that tell us this: Glencoe's designers and illustrators don't know that a mosaic or a woodcut or an engraving isn't a painting.

• The section labeled "The Hebrews" (in chapter 6) is a protracted exercise in deceit, with plenty of barefaced lies. Ignoring 150 years' worth of biblical scholarship, Glencoe's hacks have contrived some five pages of fake "history" consisting chiefly of myths -- complete with Moses and the Hebrews' hasty hike across the floor of the Red Sea. The text is rotten with evasions, ambiguities and fuzzy locutions, obviously devised to confuse students and to trick them into believing that all the tales devised by the ancient Hebrews are accounts of real persons and real events. This suffices, by itself, to disqualify Human Heritage from any consideration as a history textbook.

• Looking at page 660, I see that Glencoe is promoting one of the more egregious phonies of our time, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The Mother T promo in Human Heritage is not as voluminous as the Mother T rubbish that I recently found in McDougal Littell's World History: Patterns of Interaction, [note 4] but it is just as duplicitous and just as oblivious to history. Glencoe's book tells students this:

  By 1998, the world's population totaled more than 5.8 billion people. The work of Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa helped make people aware of hardships in developing nations, such as India. By 2050, some experts say that 80 percent of the world's population would live in less developed regions, where food shortages are already a concern. . . . [page 660]

  To anyone who remembers how Mother T inveighed against contraception and family-planning programs, and how she exploited some of the poorest people in India to promote her mercenary schemes, that passage will be particularly offensive. In my view, it is another instance of naked deceit that suffices to exclude Human Heritage from any consideration as a history textbook.

Notes

1. No one knows where Jesus was born. The common notion that he was born in Bethlehem reflects a story in the Gospel of St. Luke -- a story that is highly anomalous because, unlike most tales about Jesus, it contains claims which can be tested against historical facts. Such testing shows that the story is fiction. A detailed examination of this matter will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Textbook Letter, as one of several articles that will show how schoolbooks endorse religious superstitions and disseminate fake "information" about the history of religious sects. [return to text]

2. Glencoe's harmonious aborigines appear in a "Culture Close-up" spread on pages 48 and 49. When William Weber reviewed the 1995 Human Heritage, he said that the "Culture Close-up" items would "probably do more to mislead students than to teach them." That is certainly true of the Australian-aborigine "Close-up," which is laughable. It includes the harmony nonsense, a picture-caption that has nothing to do with the adjacent picture, and a caption which declares that the newly arrived aborigines hopped from their canoes and discovered "the eucalyptus tree," as if there were but one. In reality, Australia has more than 700 species of eucalypt, comprising seven major groups. [return to text]

3. The instructions are absurd and useless, for they will be quite incomprehensible to anyone who does not already know how to conduct an Internet search. Moreover, the Glencoe writers flagrantly promote the delusion that anything which shows up on the Internet is legitimate information. They don't warn the student that the Internet is loaded with bogus Web sites which dispense phony "information" concocted by pressure groups, hucksters and crackpots. [return to text]

4. See "She Wasn't My Mother" in The Textbook Letter for November-December 1998. [return to text]

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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