from The Textbook Letter,
January-February 1999
Reviewing a high-school book in American history
History of a Free Nation
1998. 1,118 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-02-821383-1.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 936 Eastwind Drive, Westerville, Ohio 43081.
(Glencoe/McGraw-Hill is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies.)
More Fake "History" from Glencoe
William J. Bennetta
Glencoe's History of a Free Nation is one of several
current textbooks in which history has been bashed and battered
to fit the sociopolitical ideology of the extreme left. Other
books in this category include Holt's Boyer's The American
Nation, West Publishing's United States History: In the
Course of Human Events and McDougal Littell's America's
Past and Promise. All of them are linked -- through a common
set of dogmas -- to National Standards for United States
History, a document that was issued in 1994 by a far-left
organization in California. All of them revolve around
multiculturalism [see note 1 below].
and its ideological subsystems -- racism, anti-intellectualism, Victimism, and
presentism [note 2].
When Angelo Codevilla reviewed the 1996 version of History of
a Free Nation, he scorned its "promotion of ridiculous
ignorance for the sake of hewing to pop ideology"
[note 3]. The
1998 version is almost identical with the book that Codevilla
examined, and Glencoe has even reprinted a graph which announces
that the population of the United States in 1990 was 5% greater
than itself.
Sampling the Pages
Like the 1996 version, the 1998 History of a Free Nation
has 1,118 pages -- 1,029 in the body of the book, 89 in an
appendix. To look for differences in content, I randomly
selected 102 pages in the body of the 1998 book (starting with
page 3 and ending with page 1,017), and I compared them with the
like-numbered pages in the 1996 version. Here are all the
differences that I found:
- Page 4: In the 1996 book, a time-line said that "Olmec
civilization" had begun in 1500 B.C. The time-line in the 1998
book shows nothing at all about the Olmecs.
- Page 418: "Lee's victory" (at the Second Battle of Bull Run)
has been changed to "Robert E. Lee's victory."
- Page 794: The headline over an exercise now says "Critical
Thinking Skills" instead of "Study and Writing Skills," and the
color scheme has been changed. The exercise itself remains the
same.
- Page 921: The 1996 book had hilarious errors involving a
circle-graph that allegedly showed the racial composition of the
American population in 1990. "Since persons of Hispanic origin
could be of any race," the Glencoe writers said, "they are not
identified in the race circle graph" -- but in fact, the graph
had a bright-orange sector which was clearly labeled "Hispanic"!
Further, the sum of the percentages shown on the graph was
105.1% -- so the total population, according to Glencoe, was
105.1% of the total population! In the 1998 book, the "not
identified" statement has been replaced by some pabulum, but the
graph is still idiotic.
- Page 1,013: Material from pages 1,011 and 1,012 of the 1996
version has been substantially revised and has been shifted to
page 1,013. A photo of Yasr Arafat shaking hands with Yitzhak
Rabin has been replaced by a picture of Yasr Arafat shaking hands
with Benjamin Netanyahu.
- Page 1,017: Material from page 1,016 of the 1996 book has
been rewritten and has been shifted to page 1,017, under revised
headlines -- "Attempts at Welfare Reform" and "Students as a
Resource." A photo of the Exxon Valdez disaster has been
replaced by a photo of President Clinton signing a welfare-reform
bill.
In his review of the 1996 book, Angelo Codevilla declared:
"School boards that are tired of books in which leftist
indoctrination masquerades as history will not find any relief in
History of a Free Nation."
That's still true.
Notes
- As I've noted before in these pages, the term
multiculturalism has various meanings in various settings.
In the present case, it denotes a body of leftist ideology which
proclaims that the United States is a jumble of discrete racial
or quasiracial groups, all hostile to each other. Special
attention is directed to blacks and Amerindians. These are
sanitized, glorified and portrayed as noble, saintly Victims,
while whites are viewed with contempt. This is what
multiculturalism means within the American educational
establishment. [return to text]
- Presentism is the practice of viewing the past, and judging
the people of the past, in terms of today's standards and
orthodoxies. Serious historians reject and denounce this
practice. Political ideologues and schoolbook-writers use it
regularly, to bamboozle and deceive their audiences. [return to text]
- See
"Brainless, Twisted 'History' and Ridiculous Ignorance"
in TTL, July-August 1998. [return to text]
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook
League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes
often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and
false "history" in schoolbooks.
 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
support the work of The Textbook League
The Textbook Letter is published, copyrighted and distributed by
The Textbook League (PMB 272, 40 Fourth Street, Petaluma, California 94952) |