Reviewing a high-school book in American history

The American Nation
2000. 940 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-13-434907-5. Prentice Hall.
(Prentice Hall is a part of Pearson Education, 1 Lake Street, Upper Saddle River,
New Jersey 07458. Pearson Education is a division of Pearson PLC, a British
corporation headquartered in London.)

Myths, Guesses and Confusion,
Wrapped in Beautiful Packaging

Michael B. Chesson

Inside the book, on page ii, we learn that "AmericanHeritage" (with no space between the words) means American Heritage (with a space between the words) -- the title of a popular magazine that deals with American history. Prentice Hall tells us that American Heritage is "Dedicated to presenting the past in incisive, entertaining narratives underpinned by scrupulous scholarship."

That may be a tolerable characterization of American Heritage (though the articles in American Heritage almost never have notes that would enable readers to verify statements or sources), but you won't find "scrupulous scholarship" in The American Nation. If the writers of this schoolbook had shown respect for scholarship, and if Prentice Hall had cared as much for American history as for beautiful packaging, The American Nation would be a very different product.

As you study American history, you will sometimes need to know the absolute, or exact, location of a place. For example, where, exactly, is Washington, D.C., the nation's capital?

To describe the exact location of Washington, D.C., geographers use a grid of numbered lines on a map or globe that measure latitude and longitude. . . .

The exact location of Washington, D.C., is 39 degrees (º) north latitude and 77 degrees (º) west longitude. In writing, this location is often shortened to 39ºN/77ºW. . . .

The longitude given by Prentice Hall's writers is acceptable, since the District of Columbia straddles the 77º line. However, the latitude given by the writers is wrong: The District of Columbia, with its northernmost point at about 38º53', lies wholly south of the 39º line. The reason why the writers have stated an incorrect latitude is that they have refused to deal with minutes of latitude or longitude, even though locations specified in degrees and minutes will appear in later sections of the book -- for example, in the section about the Missouri Compromise (see pages 424 and 431) and in the section about the dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the northern boundary of the Oregon Territory (see the map on page 347 and the text on page 359). These items will surely be baffling to students. High-school juniors or seniors, the supposed readers of The American Nation, can readily grasp the practice of stating latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, and there are good pedagogic reasons for teaching students about it. It is an important aspect of geography, and students need to know about it so that they can understand geographic references as they learn history.

• Pages 429 and 430: "The Compromise of 1850 . . . ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital." No, it didn't. The Compromise merely put an end to public auctions of slaves.

• Page 430: Prentice Hall's purported summary of Uncle Tom's Cabin seems to have been copied from some other purported summary. The writers allege that Simon Legree whipped Tom to death, but that is incorrect: Two other slaves did the whipping. And the writers fail to provide the important information that Legree had been born and raised in Vermont. Why is this important? Because Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to make the point that persons from any part of the country could become sadistic monsters, given the opportunity.

• Page 433: "By 1856, more than 200 people had been killed" in the fighting between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the Kansas Territory. Yes -- but this total was less than the number of Americans who died each year in railroad accidents or in steamboat explosions. Without some kind of statistical context, Prentice Hall's statement is just an insipid factoid.

• Page 435: "Many Democrats [in 1856] considered [James] Buchanan to be a 'compromise' candidate because he was a 'northern man with southern principles.' They hoped that he would attract voters in both the North and the South." Prentice Hall's writers have completely missed the import of "a northern man with southern principles." It was a political slur, an insult. It meant that Buchanan was not a respectable moderate but a "doughface" -- a northern Democrat who would be dependent on Southerners for his election, and would be controlled by them.

• Page 435: Much is lost when the writers fail to tell why Stephen Douglas had to accept Abraham Lincoln's challenge to a series of debates. Lincoln had been dogging Douglas -- following him from town to town and delivering rebuttals to his speeches.

• Page 438: "In the end, Douglas won [re-election as a United States senator from Illinois] by a slim margin." Wrong. His margin was substantial. Illinois's senators were chosen by that state's legislature, which was controlled by a Democratic majority.

• On page 438 we find this paragraph about John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry: "Brown quickly gained control of the arsenal. No slave uprising took place, however. Instead [sic], troops led by Robert E. Lee killed 10 of the raiders and captured Brown." The first man who died during the engagement at Harper's Ferry was a free black -- a railway worker who was killed by John Brown's raiders. Brown and his followers also killed a United States Marine.

• Page 438: "[When John Brown] was hanged, church bells rang solemnly throughout the North. In years to come, New Englanders would sing a popular song: 'John Brown's body lies a mold'ring in the grave, but his soul is marching on.'" Yes, but the song John Brown's Body had been sung even before the Harper's Ferry affair. It had been composed to commemorate a John Brown who had been a sergeant in the United States Army.

• Page 439: Students will inevitably become confused when they read this statement about the presidential election of 1860: "Northerners outnumbered southerners and outvoted them." That didn't happen. There were four candidates, and Lincoln, the Republican, got less than 40 percent of the popular vote. He won easily, however, in the electoral college, where the two Democratic candidates crippled each other.

• Page 442: "Texas voters chose secession, but Governor Sam Houston refused to swear allegiance to the new Confederacy." Once the Civil War began, however, Sam Houston pulled every string that he could pull to get commissions for his sons in the Confederate army.

• Page 443: Prentice Hall's writers give this characterization of the crisis that led to the Confederates' shelling of Fort Sumter: "In April, the Confederacy forced Lincoln to make up his mind." That is simplistic and misleading. It would be just as accurate to say that Lincoln -- the master of the situation -- forced Confederate leaders to make up their minds, maneuvered them into firing on the American flag, and thus created an event that would unite much of the North.

• Page 448: When they tell that Virginia joined the Confederacy, Prentice Hall's writers add this footnote: "Many people in western Virginia supported the Union. When Virginia seceded, westerners formed their own government. West Virginia became a state of the Union in 1863." This matter should be explained properly, or it shouldn't be mentioned at all. The Union fought the Civil War to suppress secession -- but the State of West Virginia, created by an act of secession, was allowed to persist even after the war ended. This evidently meant that it was constitutional for a part of a state to secede, provided that the part which seceded would then ally itself with a national political unit that held military superiority. In other words: Might makes right.

• Page 448: "The South had the strong advantage of fighting a defensive war." That may have been true in theory, but the reality was quite different. Prentice Hall's statement is both inadequate and misleading. In the east, the Confederacy often chose to fight an offensive war and twice invaded the North (both times with disastrous results). In the west, up and down the Mississippi Valley, Union generals quickly seized the initiative and never lost it. The Union won the Civil War by dominating the western theatre, where the Confederacy always fought on the defensive.

• Page 450: "The North also benefited from a strong navy and a large fleet of trading ships." The Union's "strong navy" was small, and in 1861 it was scattered throughout the world. Some Union ships took as long as two years to return to the United States after they were ordered to do so. Further, many of the Union ships that existed on paper were unfit to go to sea. The Union navy's attempted blockade was less than successful, and Confederate commerce with Europe didn't end until the Union captured Confederate ports outright. As for the North's "large fleet of trading ships": Northern merchant ships were destroyed, captured, or driven from the seas by Confederate raiders, and many Yankee owners registered their vessels under foreign flags to avoid paying maritime insurance premiums that were prohibitively expensive.

• Pages 453 and 455: The Confederate ironclad that engaged the Monitor near Hampton Roads was the C.S.S. Virginia. This vessel had formerly been called Merrimac, but not "Merrimack."

• Page 454: "[At Bull Run in July 1861] Southern troops did not turn and run as expected. Inspired by the example of General Thomas Jackson, they held their ground. A Confederate officer remarked that Jackson stood his ground 'like a stone wall.' From that day on, the general was known as 'Stonewall' Jackson." That is a myth, not history. The origin of "Stonewall" as a nickname for Thomas J. Jackson has been disputed ever since the battle. A Confederate officer, Gen. Barnard E. Bee, coined the name, but he was killed soon thereafter, and we'll never know what he had in mind; Bee may well have been referring to Jackson's stubborn refusal to advance and to support Bee's own troops.

• Page 455: When Gen. George McClellan landed his army on the Virginia Peninsula and tried to advance toward Richmond, his progress was contested by Gen. John B. Magruder and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston -- not by Robert E. Lee. Lee didn't take command until 1 June 1862. He then led the Rebel army in the Seven Days' Battle, launching attacks which were poorly coordinated and poorly executed (as might have been expected, given that Lee was an inexperienced commander supervising inexperienced subordinates). The Prentice Hall account is so badly garbled that students will not be able to understand what happened or why.

• Page 456: During the Antietam campaign, McClellan learned of Lee's plans after Union troops obtained a copy of Lee's general orders. The copy had been lost by one of Lee's own commanders, not by a "messenger."

• Page 463: "Cone-shaped bullets, which made rifles twice as accurate, replaced round musket balls." Here is another account in which facts are garbled into incomprehensibility. The Prentice Hall writers are trying to say something about a kind of bullet called the Minié ball, though they never mention its name. The Minié ball was not cone-shaped: It consisted of a solid, conoidal nose section (with a rounded tip) and a hollow, cylindrical "skirt," both made of soft lead. The hollow skirt housed a little conical plug made of metal or clay. This bullet was loaded into a musket that had rifling (helical grooves) on the inside surface of its barrel. When the musket was fired, the gases generated by the exploding gunpowder pressed on the plug, the plug forced the skirt to expand and to engage the rifling, the rifling forced the bullet to spin as it traveled through the musketbarrel, and the bullet continued to spin as it flew toward its target. (To stage a demonstration of why this spinning was desirable, get yourself a quarterback and a wide receiver. Ask the quarterback to throw ten passes in a deliberately clumsy manner, so that the football wobbles and tumbles in the air. Then ask him to throw ten passes while imparting to the ball the tight "spiral" spin that quarterbacks prize.) Rifled muskets had been developed, and had been used for firing spheroidal bullets, long before the invention of the Minié ball. But the Minié ball could engage rifling much more effectively than spheroidal bullets could, and the Minié ball -- because of its cylindrical-conoidal shape -- exhibited better flight characteristics than did spheroidal bullets.

• Page 463: "Medical care on the battlefield was crude. Surgeons routinely cut off injured arms and legs." The writers are babbling facts without trying to understand, explain or connect them. If they knew what they were writing about, they certainly would explain that the horrific frequency of amputation in Civil War field hospitals was largely attributable to the introduction of the Minié ball. A Minié ball was more than half an inch in diameter, and it weighed at least an ounce. If it struck a bone in a man's arm or leg, it shattered the bone so badly that, in a typical instance, amputation was the only practical response.

• Page 463: "On both sides, prisoners of war faced horrifying conditions. At Andersonville, a prison camp in Georgia, more than one Union prisoner out of three died of disease or starvation." The Andersonville prison camp is deservedly infamous, but it existed for only a year or so, near the end of the war. The mortality rate at Andersonville was equaled or exceeded at the Salisbury prison in North Carolina and at several of the Union camps in which Confederate prisoners were held.

• Page 464: "Near war's end, the South no longer had enough white men to fill the ranks. Robert E. Lee urged that enslaved African Americans [sic], be allowed to serve as soldiers. Desperate, the Confederate Congress finally agreed. However, the war ended before any enslaved people [sic] put on Confederate uniforms." The Prentice Hall writers are giving us some politically correct fiction instead of history. Many slaves served the Confederacy in combat from the very start of the war. Their service is not well documented in official records, because the induction of slaves into Confederate units wasn't allowed, officially, until early 1865.

• Page 465 is occupied by an illustrated article about Clara Barton. Barton was a tireless self-promoter who fashioned a mythic image for herself, but she wasn't an important figure in the Civil War. Why have Prentice Hall's writers devoted a full page to her? Were they trying to meet some sort of "gender" quota by filling a page with material about a woman? If so, they made a bad choice. Instead of glorifying Barton, they could have told about Mother Bickerdyke (Mary Ann Ball), who worked as a nurse, and later as an administrator, in Union hospitals. She won the admiration of Gen. William T. Sherman, and she rode at the head of Sherman's XV Corps in the Grand Review that was held at Washington after the war ended. Alternatively, the writers could have chosen Cornelia Hancock or Phoebe Yates Pember. These women served selflessly in Union and Confederate hospitals, respectively, and each wrote a riveting account of her experiences.

• Page 466 displays a tiny reproduction of a modern painter's rendering of a scene in which wounded troops lie in a temporary hospital. Why have Prentice Hall's illustrators used this fanciful picture? There are hundreds of photographs of real Civil War hospitals, and almost any of them would make a more meaningful illustration -- particularly if it were reproduced at a reasonable size, instead of being shrunk to the size of a Post-it.

• Page 466: "The war did serious damage to the cotton trade, the South's main source of income. Early in the war, President [Jefferson] Davis halted cotton shipments to Britain." No, the suspension of cotton shipments was imposed not by Davis but by the individual Confederate states. In any case, the South didn't have enough ships to carry significant amounts of cotton through the Union blockade, even in the early months of the war, when the blockade was at its weakest. The South developed a fleet of blockade runners, but these could not carry large amounts of bulk cargo.

• Page 467: "A few women disguised themselves so they could serve as soldiers. Loreta Janeta Velazquez, for example, fought for the South at Bull Run and Shiloh." Or so she said. The woman in question had several names, the best-known of which are "Loreta Janeta Velazquez" and "Loreta Janeta Velaques." She also had a lot of engaging stories -- and for most of them, she was the only source. The stories about her military exploits aren't supported by evidence, and they don't suffice to earn her a place in American military history.

• Page 467: "Other women worked as spies. Rose Greenhow gathered information for the South while entertaining Union leaders in her Washington, D.C., home. She was caught, convicted of treason, and exiled." Rose Greenhow was suspected of being a spy, but she was never convicted of anything -- she wasn't even brought to trial. Union officials put her under house arrest for a few months. They later held her for a short time in the Old Capitol prison, and they finally forced her to leave Washington and flee into Confederate territory. In 1863 Greenhow crossed the Atlantic, attempted to revive French and British support for the Confederacy, and collected some gold for the Confederate treasury. About a year later she tried to bring the gold back with her aboard a blockade runner, but that ship went aground near Wilmington, North Carolina. Greenhow drowned while trying to take the gold to shore in a small boat.

• Page 467: The parade of women continues as the Prentice Hall writers mention Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth and Sally Tompkins. Dix and Truth and Tompkins are worth the ink, but Barton isn't. We saw more than enough of Barton on page 465.

• Page 468: "In the East, after his victory at Chancellorsville, General Lee moved his army north into Pennsylvania. He hoped to take the Yankees by surprise. If he was successful, Lee planned to swing south and capture Washington, D.C." Prentice Hall's claims about Lee's intentions aren't supported by evidence. We don't know what Lee was planning to do when he invaded Pennsylvania.

• Page 469: "On July 3, [Lee] ordered General George Pickett to lead 15,000 men in a daring charge against the center of the Union line [on Cemetery Ridge]." Although the ensuing attack on Cemetery Ridge is now called Pickett's Charge, Pickett didn't lead it -- and the number of Confederate troops in the attacking force is not known. There is no excuse for glibly telling students that 15,000 men took part. (See Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, by Carol Reardon, published in 1997 by the University of North Carolina Press.)

• Page 471: "[In 1864] Grant and other Union generals began to wage total war against the South. In total war, civilians as well as soldiers are affected. The Union army waged total war by destroying food and equipment that might be useful to the enemy." This is all wrong, because the writers haven't tried to understand the term total war. There wasn't anything new about warfare that affected civilians, nor was there anything new about the practice of destroying things that might be useful to the enemy. Warfare had been affecting civilians, and armies had been destroying resources so that enemy forces couldn't use them, since the dawn of history. Total war is an enterprise in which civilians are not just "affected" incidentally but are attacked, terrorized and killed deliberately -- it is the kind of warfare that the Japanese waged against the Chinese in the 1930s, the kind of warfare that the Germans waged when they invaded the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Did Grant and his generals launch this kind of warfare against the South in 1864? No, they didn't. Most of today's military historians and Civil War scholars reject the claim that the Union waged "total war."

• Page 472: "Sherman's troops captured Atlanta in September 1864. They burned the city in November." Gone with the Wind is a splendid romantic movie, but it is fiction. Sherman didn't burn Atlanta -- he destroyed only its public buildings. And Prentice Hall's writers don't tell that much of Atlanta was already in ruins when Sherman arrived. Gen. John Bell Hood's Confederate troops had carried out extensive destruction before they abandoned the city to Sherman.

• Page 472: "Sherman's troops ripped up railroad tracks, built bonfires from the ties, then heated and twisted the rails." Why lead students to believe that only "Sherman's troops" used this method of destroying railways? Lee's soldiers had done the same thing in northern Virginia in 1862.

I have found two items that deserve praise. On page 459 the writers provide an excellent passage about President Lincoln's caution in dealing with slavery, and they quote a statement in which Lincoln declared that his paramount objective was to preserve the union -- regardless of whether this might entail the elimination of slavery or the continuation of slavery. (Unfortunately, the Prentice Hall writers don't cite the source of the statement. It appeared in an open letter that Lincoln sent to the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley.) On page 468 there is a good four-paragraph account of Grant's Vicksburg campaign. The writers even mention that the Confederates' last stronghold on the Mississippi -- Port Hudson, Louisiana -- fell to Union forces on 9 July 1863, with this result: "The entire Mississippi was now under Union control. The Confederacy was split into two parts. Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were cut off from the rest of the Confederacy."

• Page 478: "The North [had] lost more soldiers in the war than the South did. However, except for the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, no fighting had taken place on northern soil." Not true. Men had died on both sides when Confederate troops raided St. Albans, Vermont. (Most of the Rebels had then escaped into Canada.) Confederates led by John Hunt Morgan had carried out raids in Ohio, around Cincinnati, until Morgan was captured. There had been two major battles in New Mexico, and minor clashes in southern California and Colorado.

• Page 478: Contrary to the claim made by Prentice Hall's writers, the cities of Richmond and Atlanta had not been "leveled." The commercial and industrial districts of those cities had been heavily damaged, but residential buildings, churches, schools, and many stores were left intact.

• Page 479: Under the heading "Early Plans for Reconstruction," Prentice Hall's writers purport to describe "Lincoln's plan" for reuniting the nation. The section is a waste of space, and its content is highly misleading. Lincoln didn't have a plan -- he had several different plans, and he incorporated them into proposals which he dispatched to different audiences, including the political leaders of some of the southern states (e.g., Louisiana and Tennessee). We simply don't know what Lincoln would have done if he had lived, and there is no justification for leading students to believe that we do.

• Page 482: "After the war, most southern states had promptly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery. At the same time, however, Southern legislatures passed black codes, laws that severely limited the rights of freedmen." Here Prentice Hall's writers imply that laws restricting the rights of freedmen were originated de novo by "Southern legislatures." This implication is false and misleading. Regulations identical to portions of the Black Codes were first enforced, in various southern cities, during the spring and summer of 1865. They were enforced by Union troops.

• Page 482: Those who led the opposition to President [Andrew] Johnson were called Radical Republicans, or Radicals. A radical wants to make drastic changes in society." There are many different definitions of the term Radical Republican, and this phrase has often been employed as a label in unfair or inaccurate ways. Without careful definition and attention to context, Radical Republican can be no more useful in a discussion of Reconstruction politics than the term liberal or the term conservative can be in a discussion of the politics of the 1990s.

• On page 485, in a description of the impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson: "In the end, the Senate vote was 35 for and 19 against impeachment -- one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to remove the President from office." Again, a superficial account bearing a false implication. Johnson was formally acquitted by a one-vote margin, but several more senators were ready to vote for acquittal if their votes had been needed.

• On page 491, in a summary of the presidential election of 1876: "Southern Democrats could have fought the election of [Rutherford B.] Hayes. Hayes, however, had privately agreed to end Reconstruction. Once in office, he removed all remaining federal troops from South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Reconstruction was over." No, federal troops were not "removed" from those three states -- but they would no longer be used to intervene in disputed elections at the state and local levels. This ensured that the Democrats would gain control of the entire South.

If schools are using textbooks like The American Nation, in American-history classes, it is easy to understand why so many students arrive in college with what is, at best, a hazy knowledge of their country's past.

A History Book It Isn't

William J. Bennetta

I have written about The American Nation before, analyzing a case in which Prentice Hall's writers have engaged in plain, undeniable lying [see note 1, below]. Now I shall take a broader look at their product, and I shall begin by telling that these writers have refused to acknowledge the origins, or even the existence, of America's great national holiday.

America's great national holiday is Christmas -- our annual tribute to the power and glory of merchandising. Christmas Day comes on 25 December, soon after the winter solstice, but our celebration of Christmas spans several months. It begins slowly, in September or early October, when manufacturers start to run advertisements for newly invented gewgaws and gadgets that are "perfect for holiday giving." It gains momentum around the end of October, when shills pretending to be journalists start to report that retailers have loaded their shelves with wonderful stuff and are joyfully expecting a "holiday season" (or "holiday shopping season") that will yield record-breaking revenues and profits. In November the manufacturers double and redouble their advertising, the shills produce reports about eager shoppers and about what the shoppers are buying, and the retailers begin to stage pre-Christmas sales.

December brings the erection of Christmas trees -- in particular, the National Christmas Tree, which is installed near the White House. Christmas trees hark back to festivals in which ancient peoples celebrated the resurgence of the Sun after the solstice [note 2], but this information is absent from our national Christmas lore, and very few Americans know how they acquired the custom of displaying ornamented trees during the shortest days of the year.

As December progresses, even the humblest towns adorn their main streets with Christmas decorations, retailers turn their pre-Christmas sales into Christmas sales, the spectacle of shopping and selling becomes increasingly frantic, and the shills generate "news" stories about businesses that depend on the holiday season to produce their profits for the entire year.

In mid-December, as Christmas Day approaches, the big television networks lard their broadcast schedules with some religious shows to please Americans who enjoy recalling that Christmas was once a religious festival. Indeed it was. It originated about sixteen centuries ago, when Christians appropriated some pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, infused those celebrations with Christian symbols, myths and metaphors, and produced a new festival to mark the birth of the Christian messiah, Jesus of Nazareth [note 3]. It is not a mere coincidence or curiosity that Christmas Day comes a few days after the solstice. It is a reflection of how Christmas came into being.

Christmas in America retains other vestiges of religion too, including the installation of crèches in public places [note 4]. Crèches sponsored by city or county governments, or installed on sites owned by city or county governments, have spawned many legal actions based on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment [note 5], and some of these cases have reached the Supreme Court of the United States. For example: In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that it was permissible for a city government to join with a merchants' association in sponsoring a Christmas display that included Santa Claus, some reindeer, some candy-striped poles, a Christmas tree, a wishing well, a banner that said "Seasons Greetings," and a crèche. In that setting, the Court said, the crèche was functioning as a traditional decorative structure that didn't endorse or advance Christianity. In Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU (1989), the Court held that it was unconstitutional for a lone crèche, unaccompanied by any secular decorations, to be exhibited in a county courthouse. But in the same case, the Court found acceptable a display which had been erected at a government building and which comprised a Christmas tree, a menorah, and a sign that said "Salute to Liberty." The Court held that the menorah, when combined with the tree and the sign, wasn't an endorsement of Judaism but was a part of the message that Christmas and Chanukah occur during "the same winter-holiday season" -- a holiday season which had become a secular institution.

Though the celebration of Christmas is a conspicuous part of our national life and is bound up with a lot of cultural history and with some important constitutional law as well, the writers of The American Nation have ignored Christmas completely. Their book says nothing about it.

To be sure, these writers have ignored many other matters that are important, even indispensable, to an understanding of American history and American life -- the Norman Conquest, Vespucci's discoveries, the Atlantic cod fishery, fundamentalism, agricultural productivity, the Battle of the Atlantic, the petrochemical industries, antibiotic technology, contraceptive technology, overpopulation, the Pentagon Papers case, the Louisiana "creation-science" case, and the development of the Internet, to cite only a few. But the writers' failure to say anything about Christmas seems especially remarkable because they have given a third of a page to Kwanzaa, the fake "African" holiday that was invented by a black racist in 1966. On page 74 of The American Nation, we find a pair of pictures and this caption:

In many African societies, elaborate masks were used in political, religious, and social ceremonies. At left is a mask of a West African king, carved by African artists several hundred years ago. At right, a similar mask is present during an American family's celebration of Kwanzaa.

Admittedly, that isn't much. While it is infinitely greater than the Prentice Hall writers' coverage of Christmas, it still is close to nil. The writers fail to tell what the word "Kwanzaa" means, fail to tell what a "celebration of Kwanzaa" may entail, fail to explain that Kwanzaa is an outré hoax, and fail to tell about the colorful felon who dreamed it up. (See the article "The Kwanzaa Hoax," accompanying this review.) In The American Nation, Kwanzaa -- whatever it is -- has come from nowhere and is celebrated by American families for unknown reasons, in unknown ways, at unknown times.

• The American Nation is quite clearly an exploitation product, designed to appeal to black racists and to teachers who want to disseminate a black-racist style of "history" in their classrooms. In other words, The American Nation is a blacksploitation book [note 6].

• In pursuing their commercial objectives, the Prentice Hall writers routinely convey gross misrepresentations of our nation, our history and our national life.

• The "information" that the writers peddle consists largely of factoids, pseudohistorical snippets, and throwaway lines. As a result, The American Nation is notably short on coherence and continuity, and it is even shorter on material that has any explanatory value or that might enable a reader to discern causes and effects. A history book it isn't.

Various other characteristics of The American Nation will be elucidated later in this review, but one more of the book's fundamental features deserves to be noted immediately and right here: The American Nation is funny. Prentice Hall's writers have not laced their prose with humor or striven for comical effects, but their book is funny anyway, and sometimes hilarious. Here is why: Although The American Nation is loaded with false statements, distortions and absurdities, it boasts an "Accuracy Panel"! Yes! Page iii of The American Nation presents a lengthy list of "Program Reviewers" who allegedly have taken part in the creation of this blacksploitation farce, and the list includes:

ACCURACY PANEL Esther Ratner
Greyherne Information Services
With Marvin Beckerman, Ph.D., University of Missouri--St. Louis; Muriel Beckerman, University of Missouri--St. Louis; Lynn D. Hoover, The Hoover Associates; Jane B. Malcolm, Professional Research Services; Bennet J. Parstek, Ed.D., St. John's University, NY; Alice Radosh, Ph.D., Academy of Educational Development; Lorraine Rosenberg, Baldwin School District, NY (Ret.); Cathy S. Zazueta, California State University, Los Angeles

What a gimmick! As you read further, you will see some of the reasons why Prentice Hall's attempt to associate The American Nation with accuracy is laughable.

Prentice Hall's writers start by promoting, on page 1, the multi-culti "blending" fantasy -- the fiction that our nation arose from a fusion of Amerindian, European and West African cultures. But the writers don't know what the word cultures signifies, and they imagine that all Amerindians shared a single culture, that all Europeans shared a second culture, and that all Africans shared a third. In short, 3 continents = 3 cultures:

Over thousands of years [the Amerindians] formed diverse societies throughout North America. In the 1500s and 1600s, Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the Americas. The blending and clashing of these three cultures helped shape the nature of modern American life.

We needn't be surprised by the writers' queer notion that the Mohegans and the Catawbas and all the other Amerindians were culturally identical, or by their notion that the Estremadurans and the Bavarians and all the other Europeans pursued the same way of life, or by their notion that the Ibos and the Yorubas and all the other Africans were culturally indistinguishable -- after all, we expect deep ignorance in the hacks who cobble schoolbooks for Prentice Hall. But how about Esther Ratner and her Accuracy Panel? How could an entire Accuracy Panel have failed to notice that the writers' claim is nonsensical?

After putting forth their one-culture-per-continent rule, the hacks serve up chapter 1, a hasty mess that is called "Focus on Geography: Prehistory-Present" but is devoid of any material about prehistoric geography or even about the geography developed by the ancients. Then, in chapter 2, they return to the business of peddling their pseudohistory.

Chapter 2 bears the title "The First Americans" -- and in The American Nation, as in most multi-culti schoolbooks, the phrase the first Americans means prehistoric wanderers from Asia. Prentice Hall's writers don't even pretend to tell how prehistoric Asians could have been Americans or could have had anything to do with the history of America, but never mind. In multi-culti pseudohistory, unexplained appearances by irrelevant groups of people, and by irrelevant individuals too, are common [note 7]

The Asians wander across two pages and then are succeeded by some Amerindians, who occupy more than twenty. The pages given to the Amerindians are laden with certified multi-culti baloney. On pages 34 and 35, for example, we read about the Anasazi, a group of Amerindians who went extinct during the 1200s and who, manifestly, had no connection at all with America. The writers tell of the multistoried buildings that the Anasazi erected, they note that the Anasazi went extinct, and then they say: "Today, descendants of these early people preserve traditions of the ancient Anasazi culture." That's baloney. Because the Anasazi had no written language, there are no primary records to tell us about Anasazi myths, customs, beliefs or social practices -- and as a result, no one can know whether, or to what extent, any "traditions of the ancient Anasazi culture" may persist anywhere today. These points evidently eluded Esther Ratner and all the other luminaries of the Accuracy Panel.

The writers now dump the one-culture-per-continent rule and inform us that Amerindians comprised "many different people," had "many distinct cultures," and were divided into "many different tribes." Then they say:

The tribe felt a strong bond with the land, plants, and animals in the region where they lived. As they hunted animals or raised crops or gathered wild plants, members of the tribe tried to keep a balance with the forces of the natural world. Their religious ceremonies and daily customs were designed to help them maintain that balance.

Don't ask what "balance" means, or how the Indians divined customs that would "maintain" the balance, or what "forces of the natural world" means. That woo-woo about "balance" is completely meaningless. It is merely a restatement of one of the multi-culti crowd's favorite noble-savage fantasies -- the never-explained claim that Indians lived "in harmony with nature."

On page 38 Prentice Hall's writers purport to describe "People of the Northwest Coast." They casually claim that these people had "plenty of food" (whatever that may mean) and hence "could stay in one place," living in permanent villages and prospering from "trade with nearby groups." The writers don't mention that this trade included an extensive commerce in slaves [note 8]. And when the writers pretend to tell about potlatching, they produce a paragraph of sanitized stuff that ends with this:

At one potlatch, which took years for the family to prepare, gifts included 8 canoes, 54 elk skins, 2,000 silver bracelets, 7,000 brass bracelets, and 33,000 blankets.

Brass bracelets? Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Indians of the Northwest had neither zinc nor brass till those metals were introduced into North America by Europeans.

When the writers turn to the "People of the Great Plains," on page 41, they outdo themselves:

Large herds of animals grazed on the Plains, including buffalo, antelope, elk, deer and bighorn sheep. Plains people hunted the animals on foot. In winter, men hunted near the village. In summer, however, they often traveled for miles in search of buffalo and other animals. They carried their belongings with them on a travois (truh VOY), or sled, pulled by dogs.

The notion that "Large herds of animals" obligingly stayed "near the village" during the winter, so that Indians could kill them without having to travel, is ludicrous -- and so is the pseudozoological fancy that "buffalo, antelope, elk, deer and bighorn sheep" all occurred in "Large herds." Bison ("buffalo") form permanent herds comprising thousands of individuals, but the other species named by the writers do not. A herd of bighorn sheep, for instance, rarely has more than a few dozen individuals. Further, the different species exhibit different habits. Elk, for example, migrate to elevated regions where bison never tread -- and bighorns spend most of their time in montane or submontane habitats, even during winter, so they seldom are seen on the open plains.

As for the writers' guess that a travois is a sled: A travois isn't a sled and doesn't even resemble a sled. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged) tells us that a travois is "a primitive vehicle used by the Plains Indians of No. America consisting of two trailing poles serving as shafts for dog or horse and bearing a platform or net for the load." If Esther Ratner had tried to learn what a travois is, she could have found the answer easily.

Page 43 is given to cutaway diagrams of some Indian dwellings -- a stone-and-adobe pueblo, a tepee, and a long house. The diagrams aren't memorable for any artistic merit, but they are notable because they are the only diagrams of dwellings in the entire book. Nowhere in The American Nation is there a diagram to show any architectural or structural features of, say, the White House or Monticello or a barrack in colonial New England or a townhouse in 18th-century Williamsburg or a sod cabin on the Kansas prairie or a mass-produced balloon-frame house in the Chicago of the 1840s or a Greek-revival house in antebellum Georgia or a brick rowhouse in the Boston of the 1870s or a 20th-century bungalow in California or a Levitt house on Long Island or a housing project in St. Louis. Prentice Hall thus teaches a lesson in multi-culti racism: Indians' ways of building houses were important, but the designs and the construction techniques developed by white people aren't worth noticing.

On page 55 Prentice Hall's writers try to con students and try to bolster the multi-culti "blending" fantasy by declaring:

Native American influences also show up in language. Europeans adopted words for clothing (poncho, moccasin, parka), trees (pecan, hickory), and inventions (toboggan, hammock).

That is multi-culti cant, and we have encountered similar stuff in other schoolbooks [note 9]. The writers make hypey claims about Amerindian "influences" on our language, but they refuse to provide any numbers. Here is the number that conveys the essential truth about those "influences": Among all the verbs and common nouns that are used in everyday American English, only 200 or so are Amerindian terms or derivatives of Amerindian terms. As sources of American English words, the Amerindian tongues are about as important as, say, Persian or Maylay.

Near the end of chapter 2, Prentice Hall's writers recycle their noble-savage fantasy about Indians and nature, and this time they say outright that Indians "sought to live in harmony with the natural world." Since that claim has no meaning at all, I must wonder how Esther Ratner and the other savants of the Panel were able to certify its accuracy.

It is estimated [by whom?] that about 5,000 African Americans fought against the British.

After reading that silliness, I expected to read that the African Americans used molten lead to make ballistic missiles. Applying the 20th-century term ballistic missiles to 18th-century musket balls would be no less absurd than applying the 20th-century euphemism African Americans to 18th-century blacks [note 10].

Anachronistic "African Americans" show up repeatedly in The American Nation, in a multitude of contexts. One of their most memorable appearances occurs when (with a little help) they win World War 2 for the Allies. I'll say more about this later.

The vulgarity of the prose in The American Nation is matched by the coarseness of the book's content. In picking their subject matter, Prentice Hall's writers have aimed very low, have effectively shunned intellectual affairs, have ignored America's great intellectual institutions, and have conspicuously refused to describe America's ascent to eminence in science, technology and medicine. In my reading of The American Nation, I haven't seen anything about any American university or research institution, let alone any profiles of Americans who have won Nobel prizes for their scientific achievements. Nor have I observed any systematic exposition of how American life has continually been altered, and often has been revolutionized, by scientific discoveries and technological innovations.

Below the decks of the slave ships, slaves were crammed tightly together on shelves. One observer noted that they were "rammed like [fish] in a barrel." They were "chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close, that they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth."

That snippet is colorful, but it isn't history.

Later on the same page, the writers proffer a pseudostatistic:

Records of slave ships show that about 10 percent of Africans loaded aboard ship for passage to the Americas died during the voyage. Many died of illnesses that spread rapidly in the filthy, crowded conditions inside a ship's hold.

Such bogus "history" is worse than worthless. It misleads students, it blurs the fact that mortality rates showed huge variations, and it conceals the known correlates of mortality. Students are led to infer that death rates were essentially stable (at "about 10 percent") for some four centuries, and that crowding was a prominent cause of losses -- but both of those inferences are false. Let me describe some of the real history that pertains here:

• Mortality rates among slaves shipped across the Atlantic varied dramatically, even over periods of a few decades. Consider some examples drawn from Philip D. Curtin's famous study The Atlantic Slave Trade: During the years 1698 to 1733, mortality rates on Danish slave ships ranged from 10% to 55%. On slavers operating from Nantes in the years 1715 to 1775, losses from disease varied from 5.3% to 19.4% while losses from all causes ranged from 8.6% to 22.4%. And on slavers that sailed from Nantes in the period 1748 to 1792, mortality rates varied from 1.9% to 22.9% [note 11].

• Analyses of ships' records have consistently failed to disclose any correlation between crowding and mortality, and they have failed to support the common belief that tight packing promoted losses. Among the documented correlates of mortality, the most important was time at sea: The longer the duration of a voyage, the greater the loss of slaves [note 12].

• The overall mortality rate among slaves carried in the Atlantic trade declined significantly during the 18th century. One factor that fostered this decline in mortality was the introduction of ships that had copper-sheathed hulls. Such ships could sail faster than their predecessors, so the time required to complete a given voyage was reduced [note 12]. (A ship that had a copper-clad hull could travel faster than a similar ship possessing a plain wooden hull because copper was inhospitable to so-called "fouling organisms" -- e.g., barnacles, mussels and hydroids. A ship with an ordinary wooden hull invariably accumulated heavy, rough encrustations of fouling organisms, and these encrustations created considerable friction when the ship moved through the water, slowing the ship down. Modern experiments have shown that if a ship's hull is heavily encrusted with fouling organisms, the resulting friction can nullify as much as 30% of the ship's propulsive power.)

• In 1788 the British government adopted legislation to limit the number of slaves that could be carried in a ship of a given size. The same legislation provided bonuses for a ship's captain and for her surgeon whenever the mortality rate during a slave-hauling voyage was less than 3%. In the years 1791 through 1797, such bonuses were paid to the captains and the surgeons of roughly 50% of the British vessels engaged in the slave trade [note 13].

• Mortality rates among the officers and crewmen aboard slave ships often exceeded mortality rates among the slaves that the ships hauled. Philip D. Curtin calls attention to this phenomenon when he tells about the slavers that operated from Nantes in the years 1748 to 1792, and he says: "The data are so consistent and regular in this respect that this can be taken as a normal circumstance of the eighteenth-century slave trade. Even more unexpectedly, the death rate of slaves in transit fell progressively through the period, but that of the crew remained nearly at the same level. Apparently, the slave traders discovered ways to improve health conditions for slaves in transit, but they were less successful in meeting the dangers of malaria and yellow fever, the principal killers of strangers to the West African coast."

Real history always is much more interesting than the tripe served up by schoolbook-company hacks.

• On page 849, in a passage dealing with the 1990s, the writers say: "Overall, women's incomes rose. The gap between women's and men's wages narrowed, but did not close. On average, women earned just 70 percent of what men earned."

  That "average" is phony. If Esther Ratner had investigated the claim that "On average, women earned just 70 percent of what men earned," she would have learned that it is simply propaganda and isn't supported by evidence. For an analysis of this matter, with an explanation of how the "average" was fabricated, see John Fonte's review of Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present. (In Pathways, Prentice Hall's writers disseminate the claim that "women's pay [in 1996] averaged only about 71 percent of men's earnings.") Fonte's review ran in TTL for March-April 1999.

• On page 176, in a box labeled "Linking Past and Present," a fanciful picture of Molly Pitcher is combined with a photograph of two women in flight suits, and the caption says: "Today, thousands of American women serve on active duty in the United States military. Shown above are two female pilots aboard the aircraft carrier Eisenhower. Why do you think so many young women have volunteered to serve in the military?"

  So many? How many? The writers have not told how many women "have volunteered to serve in the military." The writers have merely offered a vague claim about "thousands," even though the pertinent figures are readily available: America's armed forces comprise some 1.4 million individuals, and about 200,000 of these -- roughly 15% -- are women.

Notice too that the question posed in the caption is mere fluff and can be answered without any application of knowledge. The student doesn't have to know or find out any reasons why any women have joined the armed forces. He doesn't even have to explain how he might make an attempt to uncover such reasons. He merely has to invent a guess about a subject that he hasn't investigated. This sort of goofiness -- this practice of leading the student to imagine that an ignorant guess is an achievement -- is common in dumbed-down schoolbooks, and it recurs at various places in The American Nation. (See also the article "Glorifying Ignorance," accompanying this review.)

Freedom of Religion       The useless index in The American Nation has no entry for freedom of religion or for religious freedom or for separation of church and state or for state religion, but I have found that the book's text contains several passages that ostensibly deal with church-and-state matters. The first such passage appears on page 88:

Pilgrims Seek
Religious Freedom In 1620 [thirteen years after colonists landed at Jamestown] another band of English settlers, the Pilgrims, sailed for the Americas. Unlike the Virginians or the Spanish, these colonists sought neither gold nor silver. All they wanted was to practice their religion freely. In England, the Pilgrims belonged to a religious group known as Separatists. They were called that because they wanted to separate from the official church, the Church of England. The English government bitterly opposed this and took action against the Separatists. Separatists were fined, jailed, and sometimes even executed. The Pilgrims' journey In the early 1600s, a group of Separatists left England for Leyden, a city in the Netherlands. The Dutch allowed the newcomers to worship freely. Still, the Pilgrims missed their English way of life. They also worried that their children were growing up more Dutch than English. A group of Pilgrims returned to England. Along with some other English people, they won a charter to set up a colony in Virginia. In September 1620, more than 100 men, women, and children set sail aboard a small ship called the Mayflower.

Read it again. The headline depicts the Pilgrims as seekers of "religious freedom," and the first paragraph declares that "All they wanted was to practice their religion freely." But then we read that after the Pilgrims found a place where they could "worship freely," in the Netherlands, they packed up and went to the New World on the Mayflower. So much for the notion that "All they wanted was to practice their religion freely."

Prentice Hall's writers later tell us that the Mayflower sailed to Massachusetts rather than to Virginia, and that 41 Pilgrims then signed a compact in which they said that they had undertaken their venture in colonization "for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith." They meant, of course, that they intended to set up a colony in which their particular species of "the Christian Faith" -- their particular species of Anglicanism -- would be the established religion.

On page 100, in a section about New Netherland, the Prentice Hall writers say: "Most settlers lived in the trading center of New Amsterdam. They came from all over Europe. Many were attracted by the chance to practice their religion freely." Then the writers purport to quote a nameless observer who allegedly wrote, "People do not seem concerned what religion their neighbor is. Indeed, they do not seem to care if he has any religion at all." That material is distorted and misleading. Even if most of the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were indifferent to religion, the government of New Amsterdam was not: The privilege of staging religious ceremonies in public was restricted to members of New Amsterdam's established sect, the Dutch Reformed Church, and people who adhered to other denominations had to keep their observances under wraps.

On page 102 we see that William Penn wanted his proprietary colony, Pennsylvania, to be "a model of religious freedom," but English officials later "forced Penn to turn away Catholic and Jewish settlers."

On page 107 the Prentice Hall writers say this about religious toleration in the colony of Maryland:

To ensure Maryland's continued growth, Lord Baltimore welcomed Protestants as well as Catholics to the colony. Later, Lord Baltimore came to fear that Protestants might try to deprive Catholics of their right to worship freely. In 1649, he asked the assembly to pass an Act of Toleration. The act provided religious freedom for all Christians. As in many colonies, this freedom did not extend to Jews.

On page 188 the writers say that the constitution of the State of Virginia protected "freedom of religion," but there is no explanation of what "freedom of religion" may have meant in 18th-century Virginia. Then the writers mention "freedom of religion" on page 209 and on page 219, with no explication whatever, in fluffy little paragraphs about the federal Bill of Rights -- and that's all for freedom of religion.

The writers never explain what freedom of religion means in the United States of America. The writers never elucidate what freedom of religion means to us now, and they never tell what it signified to the Founding Fathers. The writers fail to explain that our American concept of religious freedom shares nothing with the Pilgrims' vision of religious unanimity and of a polity devoted to nurturing an eccentric brand of Christianity. The writers never contrast our freedom of religion with mere toleration, like the toleration that existed in Peter Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam. The writers fail to quote any of the statements in which the Founding Fathers rejected the idea of an official religion -- statements that, we may guess, would have seemed odious or incomprehensible to the Pilgrims. The writers fail to tell that freedom of religion in America begins with freedom from religion -- with the First Amendment's clause that outlaws the establishment of any official church. They fail to tell that our freedom of religion is defined by a body of constitutional law that has evolved over the years and is evolving still, often in response to the "tension" between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. And they fail to describe any of the modern cases in which that body of constitutional law has been shaped and refined by the Supreme Court. The American Nation says nothing about McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) or Engel v. Vitale (1962) or Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963) or Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) or Stone v. Graham (1980) or Edwards v. Aguillard (the Louisiana "creation-science" case; 1987) or Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU. In The American Nation, no one has given any thought to freedom of religion since the 1780s, no Bible-thumpers have ever tried to subvert or destroy it, and the Supreme Court has never had to say anything about it.

Freedom of the Press       The expression "freedom of the press" occurs for the first time in a lame passage about the Zenger case. On page 122 Prentice Hall's writers characterize the Zenger case as "a dispute over freedom of the press," and on page 123 they describe the case thus:

[In New York City in 1734, Zenger] was arrested for publishing stories that criticized the governor. Zenger was put on trial for libel, the act of publishing a statement that may unjustly damage a person's reputation. Zenger's lawyer argued that, since the stories were true, his client had not committed libel. He told the jury: "By your verdict, you will have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our descendants, and our neighbors, the liberty both of exposing and opposing tyrannical power by speaking and writing truth." The Jury agreed and freed Zenger. Freedom of the press would later become recognized as a basic American right.

Prentice Hall's writers have not studied the Zenger case, and their account (starting with their botched definition of libel) is fakery. The crux of the Zenger case was Zenger's manifest guilt: He clearly was guilty of seditious libel under the prevailing law. The jury's absurd verdict was an expression of the jurymen's own feelings about that law, and it was a display of the behavior that we label "jury nullification" when we see it today. The Prentice Hall writers have failed to recognize this and have failed to make any connection between the Zenger trial and any modern instance of jury nullification.

The writers finish their fakery with the claim that "Freedom of the press would later become recognized as a basic American right." Really? What does that have to do with the Zenger case? Were publishers "later" endowed with a basic American right to engage in libel and get away with it? Is that what "freedom of the press" means in America?

No, it isn't, but no one will learn what "freedom of the press" means by reading The American Nation. After appearing twice in the context of the Zenger case, the phrase "freedom of the press" shows up five more times (as far as I can tell). On pages 188, 209, 215 and 219 it occurs in lists, without any explanation or development. Then, on page 260, it is mentioned as a basis for objections to the Sedition Act (1798) -- and that's all for freedom of the press. Prentice Hall's writers make no effort to tell what freedom of the press means in modern America; they make no effort to explain how the First Amendment's proscription against abridging the freedom of the press has been interpreted and applied by the Supreme Court; and they again fail to describe any cases. There is not a word in The American Nation about Near v. Minnesota (1931) or New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) or New York Times Co. v. United States (the Pentagon Papers case; 1971) or Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) or Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc. (1974) or Richmond Newspapers Inc. v. Virginia (1980) or Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. (1990). In The American Nation, no one has thought about freedom of the press since 1798. No government agencies have made attempts to muzzle journalists or publishers; no courts have upheld the freedom of the press by scotching such attempts; and no courts have punished journalists or publishers who have sought to use the freedom of the press as a license to libel and injure their fellow citizens.

What a spectacle! The writers of this "American history" text have devoted page after page to baloney about Indians, to trite misrepresentations of the Atlantic slave trade, and to cheesy gimmicks, but they have refused to say anything substantive about our freedom of religion or about our freedom of the press -- or, for that matter, about any of the other freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment. In The American Nation, our First Amendment freedoms are relegated to incomprehensible allusions and dead-end mentionings.

• On page 346 Prentice Hall's writers say: "In the early 1800s, four countries had claims to Oregon. These countries were the United States, Great Britain, Spain, and Russia." Russia? Why would Russia have claimed Oregon? The student can only wonder about this because the writers haven't said anything (and never will say anything) about the Russian presence in the New World, about the Russians who explored and built settlements in North America, or about the Russians who traded in the furs of North American mammals. In The American Nation, Russia's claiming Oregon appears whimsical at best.

• Prentice Hall's writers have seen something, somewhere, about the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, so on page 600 of The American Nation they say: "In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug [sic] Act. It required food and drug makers to list ingredients on their packages. It also tried to end false advertising and the use of impure ingredients." And that's all for the federal regulation of substances sold as medicines. The writers never say anything about the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, adopted in 1938, which erected safety requirements. (Manufacturers were forbidden to sell new medicinal products without first providing scientific evidence that the products were safe to use.) Nor do the writers tell about the Drug Amendments of 1962, which erected efficacy requirements. (Manufacturers were prohibited from selling medicines without first providing evidence that the medicines not only were safe but also were effective.) Nor do the writers tell about the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which has severely weakened the federal regulation of medicines. Since the adoption of that Act, manufacturers have been able to sell untried, untested medicinal products as "dietary supplements" or as "nutritional supplements," and the manufacturers have been able to use pseudoscientific claims and deceptive hokum to promote such "supplements." The Act has fostered a new era of quackery in America, complete with false or misleading advertising for potions and pills that are useless and that may be adulterated and dangerous as well -- but Prentice Hall's writers evidently don't know any of this.

• In their chapter about World War 2, Prentice Hall's writers dispatch Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in one sentence: "In June 1941, Hitler launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union." So much for that. The writers don't tell that the invasion -- Operation Barbarossa, as the Germans called it -- ultimately involved some 3 million German fighting men and became the biggest undertaking in the history of warfare on land. Nor do these writers tell how Barbarossa radically altered the nature of the war; nor do they describe any of the battles that Barbarossa engendered; nor do they tell how or why Barbarossa turned into a disaster for German arms.

• In the same chapter, the writers allude vaguely to combat in the North Atlantic -- without telling where the combat took place, without even using the word Atlantic, and without telling how the combat was resolved. Here is their entire statement: "In early 1942, the Germans seemed unbeatable. German submarines were sinking ships faster than the Allies could replace them." And so much for that. The writers never tell that the Allies (by exploiting British cryptology and American weaponry) soon neutralized Karl Dönitz's "wolf packs" of submarines, and the writers fail to report Dönitz's candid complaint that "The enemy has rendered the U-boat ineffective. . . . Not through superior tactics or strategy, but through his superiority in the field of science." As far as one can tell from reading The American Nation, the Germans successfully continued their submarine operations until the Allies ran out of ships and quit the seas.

Millions of Americans joined with troops from Britain and other allies to fight for victory. At home, civilians worked hard to support the soldiers. First, Italy was defeated, and then Germany. Finally, in 1945, the United States defeated Japan by using a new weapon -- the atomic bomb.

That is cereal-box stuff, even if Esther Ratner has mistaken it for history. The Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to put an end to the war, but Japan had long since been defeated and had been rendered defenseless -- and by the spring of 1945, Curtis LeMay was using incendiary bombs to devastate Japan's cities at will. Listen to the historian David M. Kennedy:

[Starting in March of 1945] LeMay's bombers attacked sixty-six of Japan's largest cities, destroying 43 percent of their built-up areas. They demolished the homes of more than eight million people, killed as many as 700,000, and injured perhaps one million more. Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived to be atomic-bombed only because LeMay's superiors removed them from his target list. [note 14]

The next page of Prentice Hall's textbook is dominated by an illustration, titled "Battle of the Coral Sea," which shows an American airplane flying near a Japanese carrier that is afire. The caption for the illustration fails to identify the airplane, fails to identify the carrier, and fails to tell when the Battle of the Coral Sea took place, but it provides another fluff-question so that the student can again dabble in guesswork: "How do you think new technology affected the way World War II was fought."

Even if the student reads the entire chapter, his ignorance will remain intact, because the Prentice Hall writers have excluded all but one of the technological innovations that continually shaped and reshaped combat, and continually shaped and reshaped the lives of fighting men, during World War 2. The only one that the writers have acknowledged is radar, which is mentioned in a 36-word item on page 736: "Britain used the new invention of radar to detect incoming German planes. Radar works because radio waves bounce off things. When radio waves bounce off an airplane in the sky, a blip appears on a screen."

I suppose that those 36 words filled all the available space on the cocktail napkin that the writers consulted. In any case, their dead-end mentioning of radar is plain buffoonery, as some real history will demonstrate: During the 1920s physicists in America, in Britain, in France, in Germany and in Japan independently showed that radio waves could be employed for remote detection, and the military forces of several countries developed workable detection systems during the 1930s. The use of radio-wave detection wasn't unique to Britain, and the British detection system wasn't called radar: It was called RDF, for "radio direction finder." The name radar, a contraction of "radio detection and ranging," was coined by the United States Navy, which adopted radio-wave systems for finding vessels at sea. Finding vessels at sea was, in fact, the paramount application of radio-wave detection in World War 2. From the Battle of the Atlantic to the Battle of Leyte Gulf -- in which an American fleet led by Thomas C. Kincaid used radar-directed guns to destroy a Japanese fleet in the dark of night -- radar proved to be a decisive factor, again and again, in naval combat. (Esther the Accuracy Queen evidently failed to notice any of this.)

As chapter 27 proceeds, it becomes an inane and bewildering mishmash. Sometimes quasichronological, sometimes oblivious to chronology, it bears no resemblance whatever to military history -- and the war that it purports to describe bears only a trifling resemblance to World War 2. Prentice Hall's writers mention a few campaigns and battles, but they consistently fail to tell what happened or why. On page 747, for example, we find another reference to the Battle of the Coral Sea, and we read that "After a three-day battle, the Japanese fleet turned back." Turned back? From where? What was the Japanese fleet's objective? The writers don't say. On the same page, the writers devote all of 37 words to the Battle of Midway: They characterize Midway as a "stunning victory" for the United States Navy, but they don't say anything about how that victory was achieved.

As for the Battle of Leyte Gulf: Prentice Hall's writers haven't even mentioned it. Though it involved nearly 300 ships and some 200,000 sailors and airmen, and though it was the biggest battle ever fought at sea, the writers have ignored it.

Even when battles are mentioned, field commanders are not. From the narrative in The American Nation, one must infer that World War 2 was largely an affair in which leaderless bunches of men wandered around and occasionally ran into each other and fought. One also gets the impression that the bunches who fought for America consisted chiefly of heroic blacks, augmented by some Nisei, some Latinos and some Amerindians. This impression is inescapable because Prentice Hall's writers have worked hard to create it. In a display of racism that seems extreme even in the context of The American Nation, the writers give half a page to telling of heroic performances by "African Americans," lesser quantities of space to telling about the military feats of Nisei, Latinos and "Native Americans," and no space at all to the whites who, in truth, constituted a majority of America's men in uniform. As far as one can learn from The American Nation, the only Americans who flew airplanes in combat were the black pilots known as the Tuskegee airmen, two of whom are shown in a photograph on page 743; and the only Americans who won decorations were blacks, Nisei or Latinos. (Apparently there was one white guy -- Douglas MacArthur, shown in a photograph on page 751 -- who fought for the Allies, but he didn't get any medals.) As I looked at Prentice Hall's racial effusions, I was reminded of the ravings of the Saturday Night Live character Queen Shanequa.

I thank the mammalogist Douglas Long, of the California Academy of Sciences, for informing me about some of the mammals of western North America. I thank The Textbook League's manager of research, Earl Hautala, for helping me to gather information about the Atlantic slave trade. And I thank Esther Ratner for supplying a comedic presence that made me laugh, now and then, during the grim work of reading The American Nation.

Notes

1. See "Taco Tales" in The Textbook Letter for July-August 1999. [return to text]

2. For an informative and skillfully written history of the Christmas tree, see Simon Schama's article "Whose Tree Is It Anyway?" in The New York Times for 24 December 1991. [return to text]

3. The television networks' religious shows are reliably ridiculous. Some of them are old Hollywood movies, such as The Robe (a melodrama that involves Jesus's death but has nothing to do with his birth) or The Ten Commandments (a DeMille epic that deals with Moses but does not deal with Jesus at all). Some others are made-for-TV pseudomovies which are based upon New Testament tales about the young Jesus and which are so mawkish that they make reruns of Leave It to Beaver look like deep stuff. [return to text]

4. The word crèche, in this context, means a Nativity scene -- an imaginary representation of the birth of Jesus. Almost always, American crèches reflect modern Christian myths that conflate and contradict the New Testament's two passages about the Nativity (Matthew 2:1-12 and Luke 2:7-18). [return to text]

5. The Establishment Clause forbids the erection of any official religion by any unit of government or any public agency. [return to text]

6. The word blacksploitation originated in the entertainment business in the 1970s. To learn more about the terms exploitation product and blacksploitation, see the review "McDougal Littell's Baadassss Song" in TTL for September-October 1997. [return to text]

7. I must note, too, that some purveyors of multi-culti rubbish give a wholly different meaning to the term the first Americans: They use it to mean the people who supposedly met in the New World, some 500 years ago, and started the fictitious "blending" process. (To top things off, the charlatan Joy Hakim has written a schoolbook in which the phrase the first Americans carries both of its multi-culti meanings: Hakim applies it to ancient Asian wanderers and also to 15th-century blenders, and she makes no effort to resolve the contradiction! See "Multi-Culti Joy" in TTL, March-April 2000.) [return to text]

8. Slavery was widespread among the Indians of North America and was exceptionally important, both socially and commercially, among the Indians of the Northwest, e.g., the Chinooks, the Tlingits, the Tsimshians, the Nootkas, the Makahs, the Quilleutes and the Kwakiutls. The Chinooks enjoyed special prominence as slave-traders, acquiring most of their merchandise by conducting slave raids. [return to text]

9. One of these is West Publishing Company's monumentally deceitful high-school text United States History: In the Course of Human Events (1997). See "Tom-Tom Tommyrot" in TTL for November-December 1996 (or at http://www.textbookleague.org/75injn.htm on the Web site of The Textbook League). [return to text]

10. The term African American (or African-American) gained popularity in the 1980s. It must not be confused with Afro-American, a phrase that dates from 1880 or so. Afro-American failed to catch on, and it fell into obscurity when the Bureau of the Census (in 1891, on the advice of Booker T. Washington) officially adopted the term Negro. See the article "Negro" in Hugh Rawson's fine book A Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, issued in 1981 by Crown Publishers, Inc. [return to text]

11. See Curtin's section titled "A Postscript on Mortality." The Atlantic Slave Trade was issued in 1969 by the University of Wisconsin Press. [return to text]

12. See the chapter titled "The Middle Passage" in The Transatlantic Slave Trade, by James A. Rawley, published in 1981 by W.W. Norton & Company. [return to text]

13. See the chapter "The Atlantic Slave Trade" in John Reader's book Africa: A Biography of the Continent, issued in 1998 by Alfred A. Knopf. [return to text]

14. These are the closing sentences of Kennedy's magnificent article "Victory at Sea," which appeared in the March 1999 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. To read more about Kennedy's piece, see "Superb Work" in TTL, July-August 1999, page 11. [return to text]

15. See the speech (titled "Who Prepares Our History Teachers? Who Should Prepare Our History Teachers?") that Diane Ravitch delivered to the National Council for History Education on 18 October 1997. [return to text]

Michael B. Chesson, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has written or has edited numerous publications dealing with the American Civil War. These include the book Exile in Richmond: The Confederate Journal of Henri Garidel, which will be published by the University Press of Virginia.

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.

return to top go to Home Page read our Index List, which shows all the textbooks, curriculum manuals,      videos and other items that are considered on this Web site subscribe to The Textbook Letter order back issues of The Textbook Letter support the work of The Textbook League contact The Textbook League by e-mail The Textbook Letter is published, copyrighted and distributed by The Textbook League (P.O. Box 51, Sausalito, California 94966)