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The textbook in American history is an institution in itself. Such texts are used in Advanced Placement (AP) courses in 11th grade in high schools across the country, and they show up again in the two-semester surveys of American history that millions of college students take in their freshman year, often required by state legislatures or college trustees. The texts can turn authors into millionaires and make a lot of money for successful publishers. They are also in some ways works of art, accurately summarizing the scholarship of hundreds of historians who have labored in the primary sources and diligently produced monographs unreadable except to the erudite or masochistic. The texts bring together inquiries in political, diplomatic, economic, labor, intellectual, religious, cultural, ethno-racial, and gender history—and whatever other kind of history industrious American historians have invented.
Unto A Good Land: A History of the American People
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The textbooks are also behemoths. They are the volumes that are causing health nuts to worry about the burden of backpacks on schoolchildren. Unto a Good Land—a survey of American history recently published by Eerdmans—weighs between 6.5 and 7 pounds on my bathroom scale. It has more than 1,200 pages, and they are double columned. Over 800 words can be crammed into a single page, although there are also pictures, maps, cartoons, engravings, and inset sections entitled "In Their Own Words" that break up the text. There are also appendices that reprint the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, election results, and a chart of population growth. Instructors can get a manual and a "Test Bank" that has lecture notes, discussion items, and multiple choice and essay questions for exams. Students can go online to a website to get full texts of documents. But Unto a Good Land also provides outlines for each chapter to help students, and at the end of each chapter this text is exemplary in recording a short catalogue of books for additional reading. The lists are elementary enough so that students may actually use them.
Such texts usually don't become the permanent possession of students, for (in high school) they turn in the books at the end of the year, or (in college) sell them at once to used book dealers. One step ahead of the second-hand trade, publishers and authors regularly put out newer editions. What is the point of these textbooks and the course that they help to define? I think that the answer to this question has little to do with the students and an awful lot to do with the profession of history and its professoriate.
When grownups assign a text to teach in high school, they use it to prepare the students for the college placement test—a test that will enable them to get college credit for the basic course in American history. The emphasis is on a whole raft of dates, names, and occurrences. For example, students learn that Jonathan Edwards was a great American Calvinist preacher and theologian. In New England in the 1730s and 1740s he led the revivals of religion in what was later called the Great Awakening. Edwards introduced passional forces into American spirituality and frightened respectable conservatives. In 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut, he delivered a sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which is a good example of his reasoning and of the emotional style unleashed in the Awakening.
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