Reviewing a high-school book in social studies

Global Studies
1997. 640 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-835-92201-4.
Globe Fearon Educational Publisher, 1 Lake Street,
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458.
(Globe Fearon is a division of Simon & Schuster, which
is a part of the entertainment company Viacom Inc.)

The Geography Is Fictitious,
the History Is a Hodgepodge

Paul F. Thomas

Global Studies opens with a nine-page introduction ("The World and Its Cultures") that professes to lay out concepts that will figure prominently in the rest of the text. Here we find some ostensible definitions of terms such as culture, global village and nuclear family, some short paragraphs about "Learning a Culture," "Beliefs and Customs," "Religion" and other topics, and two pages about the "five basic themes" of geography.

The bulk of the book consists of six units about six regions: "Africa," "South and Southeast Asia," "East Asia," "Latin America and Canada," "The Middle East" and "Europe and Eurasia." Each of these regional units is less than 100 pages long.

After the last regional unit there is a 49-page "Reference Section" that includes 17 pages of uninformative, visually unappealing maps, an 11-page glossary, and an 18-page index.

The introduction is incoherent and is so weak that it even fails to explain what the phrase "global studies" means. It also is misleading, because the concepts that it mentions are not employed in any useful or systematic way in the rest of the book. As a case in point: Students who read the introduction will find a quarter-page of text about "A Global System" and "interdependence," but they will find very little corroboration for those ideas in the next 600 pages. They will see, for example, a table of "Major Japanese Exports and Imports," but without any indication of what nations are Japan's trading partners. They will see pie charts showing petroleum production and petroleum consumption in some regions, but nothing to show how petroleum moves from high-production regions to high-consumption regions.

Those charts of petroleum production and consumption are worthy of comment for another reason: They refer to seven regions ("Africa," "Asia," "Europe," "Former Soviet Union," "Middle East," "North America" and "Central and South America"), and students have no way to translate that seven-region array into the six-region scheme on which the book is based. This is one of many signs that Globe Fearon's writers haven't given much thought to geography.

The six-region scheme itself doesn't have any foundation in geography and doesn't make sense:

• The region "Europe and Eurasia" is a conceptual absurdity because Eurasia includes Europe. Eurasia is the great "World Island," and Europe is a part of it.

• The region that Globe Fearon's writers have named "South and Southeast Asia" is, like Europe, a part of Eurasia. So is "East Asia." So is most of the region that the writers call "The Middle East." By pretending that these regions are separate from Eurasia, the writers create more absurdities.

• In delineating "South and Southeast Asia," the writers have decided that this region includes Australia! In the real world, Australia is a continent in its own right -- but in Global Studies, it is a part of Asia.

• There is no physical, cultural, political or logical basis for treating Latin-America-plus-Canada as a single region.

• The writers have done away with the United States and its inhabitants. In Global Studies, the United States has no place in any of the world's regions, and Americans have no place among the world's "cultures."

The last point needs special attention because Americans have exerted potent cultural influences on many other peoples during the second half of the 20th century, and American ideas have figured strongly in the emergence of a global economy and in the concomitant movement toward a homogenized global culture. No one can write intelligently about "world cultures" while ignoring the Americans.

On page 6, in the introduction, the writers correctly say that climate is an environmental variable which affects local culture by influencing peoples' choices of what crops to grow, what clothing to wear, what kinds of buildings to erect, and what types of work to do in a given place. But this appears to be a throw-away comment, because it isn't reflected in later chapters. The writers fail to make any systematic examination of the influences of climate on different peoples, and they fail to provide information that might enable students to perceive some effects of climate by comparing one culture with another.

Even at the regional level, the writers don't seem to grasp why climate is important or how climates can be treated in a consistent way. The unit on Africa has a half-page of text, under the heading "Climate," where the writers mention four climatic types: "tropical rain forest," tropical wet-and-dry, desert, and Mediterranean. (The first of those is spurious and is unknown in geography. What Globe Fearon's writers call a "tropical rain forest" climate is what geographers call an equatorial climate.) On the next page a map titled "Africa's Climates" shows six, not four, climatic types, and the caption asks: "Which parts of Africa have a vertical climate?" The answer is: None, because "vertical climate" is a nonsense term invented by the writers. I wonder why they haven't invented a horizontal climate and a diagonal climate as well.

When the writers tell about Australia (which, you must remember, is now a part of Southeast Asia), they lump climate with "resources." Australian climates apparently aren't important enough to be considered in their own right. On the other hand, the climates of Canada are so important that they command a discrete section of text (but no map), and they are discussed separately from the climates of Latin America -- even though, according to this book, Canada and Latin America form a single region. Latin America's climates merit a map, on page 308. By the time the writers get to "Europe and Eurasia," they are so exhausted by their game of climatic hopscotch that they give up and ignore climates entirely. As far as one can tell from reading Global Studies, "Europe and Eurasia" have no climates!

Some of the writers' successes take the form of short, easily digested historical narratives. In the unit about Africa, for example, some aspects of early African history are handled in a fairly objective manner; and when the writers discuss the Atlantic slave trade, they frankly acknowledge the role played by African rulers who captured and enslaved their fellow blacks, then exchanged them for guns, ammunition and other Western products (page 35). The 19th-century scramble for African territory by European imperialists is also handled objectively, along with some of its consequences that have persisted into the present.

The writers score similar successes in the book's other units too, sometimes by providing "Case Study" sidebars that resemble magazine articles. Each such sidebar occupies one or two pages. Titles include "The Hollywood of India," "The Myths of Indonesia," "Return to the Killing Fields [of Cambodia]," "Inside a Shantytown in Caracas," "Forty Years of Castro's Cuba," "The Kurds Seek a Home," "The Rhine in European Life" and "Women in the Industrial Revolution." However, the impressions conveyed in the case studies are not always accurate, nor is there enough systematic, comparative information to ensure that the case studies will accomplish anything more than seduction and entertainment.

There are bigger issues here, however: the issues of distortion and selective omission. When we read historical material, we always must ask: Whose story is being told? Why is the story being told in this way? And whose story is not being told? With these questions in mind, we can point to interesting anomalies in Globe Fearon's versions of history, and even in the time-lines on the opening pages of the various units. In the unit on Africa, for example, the "History" time-line indicates that only two significant events have occurred in Africa since 1910: the establishment of apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's president in 1994. There is no acknowledgment of the European colonial powers' retreat from Africa during the 1960s, although this retreat -- which accelerated SubSaharan Africa's social disintegration and ecological ruination -- was vastly more significant than the rise and fall of apartheid.

In the unit about South and Southeast Asia, the "History" time-line stops when Gandhi, in 1920, becomes the leader of the Congress party. Even the advent of India's independence, in 1947, is ignored.

In the East Asia unit, the "History" time-line fails to show that Japan invaded China in the 1930s, and it omits World War 2 entirely! In fact, the time-line shows nothing whatsoever between 1889 (when Japan got its first constitution) and 1950 (when the Korean War began).

The only "History" time-line that acknowledges World War 2 is the one in the "Europe and Eurasia" unit. That unit also has a "Culture & Society" time-line which indicates that, since 1789, "Europe and Eurasia" have produced only one significant cultural or social event -- the Nazis' killing of some six million Jews. Here the writers have produced one of their most egregious omissions. The Nazis' attempted genocide of the Jews may have been a defining moment in Jewish history, but what of all the other people who have died unnatural deaths in "Europe and Eurasia" during the 20th century? In the Soviet Union alone, the systematic use of terror and extermination by the Soviet state led to the deaths of more than 50 million people between 1917 and 1959 -- and more people perished at Vorkuta, one of numerous death-camps in the GULAG system, than ever were killed at Auschwitz. In China, during the 1960s, Mao's cultural revolution precipitated the deaths of 50 million Chinese, but the writers of Global Studies do not know this or do not care.

The writers' choice of the Jewish Holocaust as the grand manifestation of modern Europe's "Culture & Society" seems to be part of a broader preoccupation with Jewish affairs, and on page 427 the writers present a highly romanticized, antiseptic accountof early Judaism and of Jewish doctrines. For example:

Since ancient times, Jews have had books of laws that help them follow the covenant. These books teach Jews to think of everyone as equal [sic!]. They teach that all people have rights. Jews are taught to be fair and do good in the world. Their reward is knowing that they are doing God's will.

Of course, no ethnic or religious group is as homogeneous or as virtuous as that passage would lead students to imagine. It is true that, since the 18th century, highly enlightened codes of universal ethics have been embraced by some of Judaism's various factions, but surely not by all of them. It also is true that,over the centuries, classical Judaism has been employed to justify racist or xenophobic attitudes. (See, for example, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by the Israeli scholar Israel Shahak, published in1994.)

On the same page, Globe Fearon's writers give an absurd, romantic account of the origins of Christianity, complete with the information that early Christians were persecuted by the Romans. They don't tell that Christianity, as a renegade Jewish sect, was first persecuted by the Jews themselves.

Each of the six regional units in Global Studies ends with a"Global Issues" article, dealing with something that affects, or can be observed in, more than one region. The titles of the six articles are "The Many forms of Government," "How Economic Systems Compare," "The Information Age," "Rain Forests Around the World," "The Growth of World Cities" and "The UN Works to Preserve the Peace." Here again, the emphasis is on story-telling rather than analysis, but the articles can excite students' interest, and the topics are not trivial.

Curiously, many of the questions and problems posed to the students are well written, significant and probing. Some examples are: "How did the downfall of the Soviet Union affect Vietnam?"; "How did Chinese civilization influence Korea?"; "How are the lives of young Aymarás different from your life?"; "[Write] a newspaper editorial about Russia's relationship with its neighbors and the rest of the world." Unfortunately, the information given in the text is often too thin to enable the students to produce a good response.

In sum, Global Studies is a poor job. Though it purports to deal with cultures, it doesn't describe cultures in any systematic way, and it doesn't enable students to make intercultural comparisons. The "geography" in this book, including the division of the world into regions that make no sense, is unacceptable. The historical material is sometimes good, sometimes badly distorted. At best, Global Studies can be seen as an appetizer: It might help to stimulate students' interest in some "global issues" before the students begin to read books that provide competent, legitimate expositions of geography, history or world cultures.

This "Cultures" Text
Is a Brainless Mess

William J. Bennetta

Globe Fearon does not tell the answer, but I think that I know it. This book was evidently tossed together for sale in the State of New York, where a state syllabus declares that students should take "global studies" courses dealing with other nations and their cultures. I suspect that Globe Fearon, in using the title Global Studies, hopes to make New York educators imagine that there is some link between this book and the prescription in the New York syllabus.

Global Studies is the newest "cultures" schoolbook that I have examined in these pages. The others are Prentice Hall's World Cultures (see TTL for March-April 1994) and Silver Burdett Ginn's World Cultures (see TTL for November-December 1996). Global Studies closely resembles those earlier books, and it shares their fundamental features:

• Global Studies is a chaotic collection of bits and pieces, many of which seem to have been cut from old history books or geography books. These snippets have been pasted together hastily, with no evident rationale, no discernible themes, and no detectable attempt at organization.

• This "book about the world's cultures" fails to exhibit any recognition of what cultures are, fails to show any awareness of how cultures can be studied and compared, and fails to analyze any culture anywhere.

• The book is full of "facts" that are fake.

• The fakery, distortions, in consistencies and contradictions in Global Studies are so blatant that the book seems deliberately to mock the educators to whom it supposedly will be sold.

The writers of Global Studies ignore most of those questions, but they do make a pretense of telling what "culture" means. This effort, on page 2 in the "Introduction," is appallingly ignorant. After telling that people who live in certain nation-states display certain differences in behavior, the writers say:

All these differences are differences between cultures. Culture is the way of life of a group of people. You may think of culture as what people add to the natural world. All people have a culture.

The people who share a particular culture may or may not live in a single country. For example, people of the Jewish faith live in many countries of the world, including the United States, South Africa, Mexico, and Israel.

So, according to these writers, a culture is a religion -- nothing more, nothing else. That must be true if all the people who follow "the Jewish faith," no matter what else those people may do, belong to one particular culture.

But of course, that isn't true. The writers don't know what they are talking about, and their ignorant claim about Jews is reminiscent of a theme that has appeared in many anti-Semitic tracts -- the theme of the global Jewish conspiracy. This is the notion that all Jews, no matter where or how they live, are united in some sort of tribal cabal, and that their fealty to this cabal overrides their allegiance to any state or to any other institution. It is humbug, and I am disgusted to find it reflected, no matter how weirdly, in a schoolbook.

Having shown us the true nature of the Jews, Globe Fearon's writers continue:

One country may contain more than one culture. The United States is a country with people from many different cultures. Therefore, we say that the United States is a country of cultural diversity.

That seems half-right, but look at what happens next. Though the writers have already defined "culture" twice (first by saying that it means "the way of life of a group of people," then by making "culture" a synonym for "faith"), they now uncork a headline that asks "What Is Culture?" This introduces a passage in which the student reads that

Culture embraces far more than the arts, . . . . For instance,if you put on jeans in the morning, listen to rock music, go to school five days a week, and watch football games on television on weekends, you are participating in U.S. culture.

What? The writers said earlier that the United States has many cultures, but now there is just one "U.S. culture"? Which notion should the student believe? And what is this "U.S. culture"? Is it only a matter of jeans and rock music and football games, with no religious faith? How can that be, if culture and religious faith are equivalent? And what if a person wears jeans, listens to rock music, watches football games, and practices Judaism? Is he "participating in U.S. culture," or is he excluded from this because he belongs to the global Jewish culture?

My point here is that Globe Fearon's writers clearly have not bothered to learn what culture means or what cultures are. They have merely conjured some rubbish that is confused, self-contradictory, and occasionally vicious.

• The writers allocate more than a page to telling how Arabs in Saudi Arabia prepare a feast to mark a holiday or to honor a visitor. Okay, but I see nothing about the ceremonial meals eaten by Bavarians, Sri Lankans, Bretons, Trobriand Islanders, Muscovites, Turkish Cypriots, or anyone else. Ceremonial eating is an important aspect of all cultures, as far as I know, but in Global Studies it occurs only among Saudis.

• The writers devote a full page to telling how male adolescents of the Fali tribe, in Cameroon, "are initiated into manhood in an elaborate ceremony." And that is the book's only account of any coming-of-age ceremony, anywhere, though the writers casually mention that other cultures have rituals to "mark the time when children become adults." Correct. But this book describes only one, so the student can't compare rituals, can't deduce their common themes or purposes, and can't see how some of them have changed in response to cultural diffusion.

• This textbook says almost nothing about technology, and the writers flatly refuse to acknowledge that technology is a fundamental element of culture. There is no systematic demonstration that discrete peoples have devised characteristic kinds of technology, and there is no demonstration that various cultures have literally been defined by the kinds of technology that they used. There are a few vague allusions to technology, as when the writers tell how the ancient Egyptians treated their dead, but most peoples seem not to have developed any technology at all.

• For that matter, most peoples, whether extinct or modern, seem not to have developed any ways of handling their dead. Global Studies mentions the Egyptian custom of mummification, but it says nothing about the rites practiced by Etruscans, Aleuts, Haitians, Fijians, Macedonians, Taiwanese or anyone else.

• Mating and marriage practices are represented by some random mentionings only. In Global Studies, most of "the world's cultures" seem not to have any mating or marriage practices at all -- and the student has no chance of seeing how countless peoples regulate mating to regulate the flow of status, privileges, allegiances and responsibilities from one generation to the next.

These cases, I believe, suffice to show that Global Studies is a brainless mess, offering the student nothing but an opportunity to engage in brute memorization of random factoids. There is no possibility that a student will perceive any universal aspects of culture, will see that cultures can be studied in a consistent and systematic way, or will be able to make cross-cultural comparisons.

In many cases, a student won't even be able to perceive that cultures have any culture. On page 197, for example, the writers dispose of all the peoples of Oceania in one paragraph, saying that Oceania has "many cultures" and that Melanesia has "hundreds of different groups." These "cultures" and "groups," however, have no traits. The writers do not cite any cultural feature of any Oceanian population, or anything that may distinguish one population from another. On page 214, the writers deal similar treatment to the peoples of modern China, announcing that China has 56 ethnic groups. One of these groups is called the Han. The other groups are nameless. No group has any characteristics.

Other comedic effects appear when the writers invent "history" that is dominated by presentism -- the practice of making the past fit today's social and political orthodoxies. For an example, go to the unit about the Middle East and look at the silly passage about Jesus. Here we read that Jesus was killed by the Romans because the Romans saw him as a "threat to their power"! Now, that is funny stuff. Nobody knows the circumstances of Jesus's death, and even the stories in the four canonized gospels fail to provide any suggestion that the Romans saw him as a threat. In fact, the gospels say that the Roman governor of Judea found him guiltless but ultimately ordered his death to placate the mob.

Muslim tales fare better than Christian ones do, for the writers retell the legend of Muhammad's "vision of the angel Gabriel" as if it were fact. They deliver other bits of supernaturalism too, including the notion that a comet appeared as an "omen" to foretell the destruction of Montezuma and the Aztec empire.

In pretending to tell about religion in modern Africa, the writers lead students to believe that Africans follow Christianity or Islam or "traditional African religions," as if these were discrete and mutually exclusive. They ignore all the syncretism that has produced hybrid religions in which indigenous African concepts and practices have been fused with Christian or Islamic constructs. The writers also fail to tell anything about belief in witchery, a conspicuous and dramatic aspect of religion throughout black Africa. (In Zambia, for example, efforts to combat the spread of AIDS have suffered because rural Zambians believe that AIDS is the work of witches. In South Africa, the practice of killing suspected witches has resurged in the last four years or so. In Benin, the government has officially recognized voodoo as a religion and has instituted a national Voodoo Day. In various states of West Africa, there is a widespread belief that a witch can make a man's penis disappear by merely touching him. This superstition was the impetus for a bizarre event that took place,a few years ago, in Nigeria. Some officials of the Nigerian government refused to shake hands with visiting dignitaries who, they imagined, were witches.)

Is there anything respectable in this book? Yes. I have found two items:

• In the chapter titled "The Early Civilizations of Latin America," the writers discuss the Aztecs without resorting to whitewash or Victimist flatus. (But then, alas, they ruin their effort by peddling that nonsense about the "omen.")

• In the chapter on "The Early History of Africa," the account of the African slave trade is good, and it makes clear that the business of enslaving Africans was carried out by Africans, not by Europeans or Americans. (But this passage is wrecked when the writers spike it with presentism, asking the student to ponder an absurd question -- "How did the slave trade rob Africans of their human rights?" In the heyday of the African slave trade, our modern doctrine of human rights didn't exist in Africa or anywhere else.)

To conclude: I regard Global Studies as a conglomeration of factoids, superstitions and anachronisms, unfit for any educational purpose.

Bad History, Bad Geography
... and Worse Anthropology

Charles B. Paul

If the phrase Global Studies is obscure, some clarification is provided in the book's preface, which claims that "Global Studies is a book about the world's cultures." A more accurate statement would be: Global Studies is a book about what Simon & Schuster calls "world cultures." Globe Fearon is a division of Simon & Schuster, which also owns Prentice Hall, and Global Studies bears a strong resemblance to Prentice Hall's book World Cultures, published in 1993. That book, in turn, appears to be a kind of spinoff from another Prentice Hall book, World History: Patterns of Civilization.

While World Cultures has been sold as a high-school book, Global Studies apparently is meant for sale to middle schools. Its vocabulary, syntax and paragraph structure are simpler, but its organization and approach are the same as those used in World Cultures.

Both books are divided into major units that correspond to physical -- not cultural -- regions. In World Cultures the regions are "Africa," "South Asia," "Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania," "East Asia," "Latin America and Canada," "The Middle East" and "Europe and the Former Soviet Union." Global Studies shows the same sequence, with two minor differences: South Asia and Southeast Asia have been lumped into a single unit; and the final unit in Global Studies carries the elusive title "Europe and Eurasia," implying that Europe and Eurasia are separate entities. (They are not. The former is a part of the latter.) In both books, the United States is ignored.

Each regional unit in Global Studies, like each in World Cultures, contains brief sections about a number of topics: the region's land, climate and people; the region's history (or the history of the region's major nation-states); some traditional forms of belief and behavior among some of the region's peoples; some ways in which beliefs and mores have been transformed in the 20th century; and some "problems" that the region's inhabitants face today.

Another major defect that Global Studies shares with World Cultures is that the terms culture, ethnicity and ethnic group are bandied about uncritically, in ways that are sure to cause confusion. Global Studies equates culture with "the way of life of a group of people" (page 2) and defines ethnic group as a "group of people who share a common history, language, culture, and way of life" (page 21). So we have two vague definitions that overlap and that make us wonder whether "culture" and "way of life" are the same thing or different things.

For some reason, the writers assume that language is the chief criterion, or the only criterion, for identifying an ethnic group. In the section about Switzerland, for example, the caption beside a photograph of a patriotic scene says that Switzerland is "made up of three different ethnic groups," defined by their three different languages. However, the caption also says that most Swiss citizens are multilingual, meaning that they can speak two or more languages. Does this mean that most Swiss citizens belong to two or more ethnic groups? Can one individual belong to two groups that have different histories and different ways of life? How can that be possible? And why do the writers of Global Studies imagine that Switzerland has only three languages? It actually has four. Some Swiss speak Romansch, an offshoot of Latin.

Similar confusion appears throughout Global Studies. In the section titled "Central Europe," for example, the writers say:

The people of Central Europe belong to three main groups. The two largest groups are German speakers and people who speak a Slavic language. The third main group is the Magyars of Hungary.

What is the meaning of "groups" here? Does it mean ethnic groups? If we were to accept the writers' claim that ethnic groups are defined by their languages, we would say yes, those three main "groups" are ethnic groups. But the notion that Central Europe has only three ethnic groups is absurd.

It may be, however, that those three main "groups" are culture groups. The writers use that term -- "culture groups" -- on page 121. They do not tell what a "culture group" is, or whether a "culture group" is something different from an ethnic group or from a culture. The student cannot hope to understand what the writers mean.

The failure to integrate information recurs in many other casesas well. For example, this book (like Prentice Hall's World Cultures) deals with art by merely giving occasional, helter-skelter glimpses at various artistic media and styles, with no elaboration or explanation. Sometimes, a civilization's entire artistic life is reduced to a few lines -- as when all the enormously rich and sophisticated art of dynastic China is dismissed in some 30 words about Ming pottery. That is scandalous.

Mistakes are abundant, in the text and the illustrations alike. For instance, a photo caption speaks of ancient Egypt's "huge stone pyramids," but no such structures appear in the photo! A map indicates that the ancient Romans conquered most of Scotland. (Emperor Hadrian would have been awfully surprised to learn this.) The text on page 162 says that the map on page 595 shows the Strait of Malacca, but the Strait isn't there. Even the tiny passage about Belgium, my native country, has two errors. Belgium's two major regions, Wallonia and Flanders, are mislocated, and the writers incorrectly say that the language spoken in Flanders is Dutch. The language of Belgian Flanders is a variant of Dutch called Flemish.

In at least two instances, unverifiable beliefs are treated as history. On page 426 Moses is depicted as a person who actually existed and who "led the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt to freedom"; and on page 428, the writers present as fact the Muslim claims that Muhammad "had a vision of the angel Gabriel" and that "a voice told Muhammad to preach the word of God."

We also find many passages that are hilariously misleading, as when we discover why 16th-century Europeans wanted Southeast Asian spices, such as cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon: "Europe was hungry for spices. With them, food could be kept much longer. In the time before refrigerators, preserving food was very important." Are we to conclude that preserving food is not important today, because we now have refrigerators? And where did the writers get their wrong idea that "food could be kept much longer" if it was dosed with spices? Have the writers mistaken cinnamon for salt?

Given all the foolish features of Global Studies, it comes as a shock to find an occasional passage that achieves competence or that candidly handles a topic which other books avoid or distort beyond recognition. The writers of Global Studies do a nice job of balancing the beneficial and the harmful effects of British rule in India (pages 130 and 131), and they give an excellent explanation of why, since World War 1, Arab peoples of the Middle East have generally distrusted and hated the West (pages 437 and 438).

The writers also should be commended for showing that all kinds of people have practiced slavery and oppression, and for telling that the Atlantic slave trade succeeded only because African rulers were willing to "capture people who lived inland," bring them to coastal trading centers, and sell them to foreign merchants.

Notwithstanding its occasional flashes of competence, however, Global Studies is a failure. The writers seem to have fashioned this book by pasting together a lot of chunks from earlier books -- most notably World Cultures. The result is a combination of bad history, bad geography, bad travel literature, and worse anthropology.

Paul F. Thomas is both a professor of geography and a professor of education at the University of Victoria (in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada). His research interests include the political geography of Eastern Europe. He regularly reviews geography books for The Textbook Letter.

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 frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

Charles Paul, a specialist in cultural history, is a professor of humanities, emeritus, from San Jose State University. He has published scholarly articles on literature and music, and he has written a book, Science and Immortality, about the science and the scientists of 18th-century France.

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