A History of US subjects students to religious indoctrinationA History of US is a series of eleven American-history books published by Oxford University Press. Oxford promotes and sells them as schoolbooks. In each of the first ten books of the series, the author shown on the title page is Joy Hakim. The eleventh book is anonymous. Book 2 of A History of US is titled Making Thirteen Colonies, and it purports to cover American history during the period 1600 through 1740. This book has no place in any public school because it is spiked with religious preaching: Joy Hakim employs Making Thirteen Colonies as a platform for promoting her personal religious beliefs, for falsely depicting religious myths as matters of historical fact, and for subjecting students to religious indoctrination. A detailed analysis of Hakim's preaching in Making Thirteen Colonies has appeared in The Textbook Letter, as part of an article titled "Textbook-Writers Promote Religious Tales as 'History'." In August 2001, The Textbook League learned that the California State Board of Education had approved and adopted Making Thirteen Colonies (and all the rest of the A History of US series) for use in public-school classrooms. The League then sent a letter to the California Board to demonstrate that Making Thirteen Colonies -- because it promoted a specific body of religious beliefs and thus elevated one religion to a place of privilege above all other religions -- was unacceptable as a schoolbook. In the same letter, the League petitioned the Board to revoke the adoption of A History of US, and to take other corrective actions, so that California students would be protected from any further exposure to Hakim's bogus "history." To learn more about this matter, please read:
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