American English Textbook Pdf

[Debra Necochea]

Below is the "Red Textbook" online. Click on the name of the chapter you desire to reveal each of the sections. Click on the section you desire and it will open in a new browser tab. When looking at the textbook pages, do not try to navigate using the buttons at the top of the page, they are not functional for this online format.

When I was a high school junior in New Orleans taking AP American history, my teacher assigned us a paperback book. Slim in contrast to our hulking required textbook, it was a funny, compelling, even shocking read. Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, explained how history textbooks got the story of America wrong, usually by soft-pedaling, oversimplifying and burying the thorny drama and uncertainties of the past under a blanket of dull, voice-of-God narration.

He tells NPR, "I started out the new edition with the famous two photographs of the inaugural crowds of this guy named President Obama, his first inauguration, and this guy named President Trump, his first and maybe only inauguration. And you just look at those two photos and they're completely different. There's all kinds of grass and gaps that you see in the Trump photo. ... What that does, I hope, is signal to every reader of the book: Yes, there are such things as facts here. You can see with your own eyes."

My first full-time teaching job was at a black college, Tougaloo College in Mississippi. I had 17 new students in my new second semester [freshman sociology] seminar and I didn't want to do all the talking the first day of class so I asked them, "OK, what is Reconstruction? What comes to your mind from that period?"

And what happened to me was an aha experience, although you might better consider it an oh-no experience: 16 out of my 17 students said, "Well, Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the Southern states. But they were too soon out of slavery and so they screwed up and white folks had to take control again."

Second, the Reconstruction governments did not screw up. Across the South without exception they built the best state constitutions that the Southern states have ever had. Mississippi, in particular, had better government during Reconstruction than at any later point in the 19th century.

[Loewen, along with colleagues and students, co-wrote a new high school state history textbook called Mississippi: Conflict and Change. Despite high ratings from reviewers, the Mississippi State Textbook Purchasing Board rejected the book on the grounds that it was racially inflammatory. Loewen and his co-authors sued the board.]

The assistant attorney general for the state of Mississippi asked why he had voted against our book. And he had us turn to [a] page where there's a photo of a lynching. Now, our textbook at that time was the only textbook in America that included a photo of a lynching. And ironically almost none do to this day.

Turnipseed is on the stand and he says: "Now, you know, some ninth-graders, especially black male ninth-graders, are pretty big, and I worried that teachers, especially white lady teachers, would have trouble controlling their classes with material like this in the book."

Usually when I'm asked, "What's the biggest lie?" I put my hand out in front of me slanting upward and to the right. And what I mean by that is the overall theme of American history is we started out great and we've been getting better ever since kind of automatically. And the trouble with that is two things. First of all, it's not always true. ...

And the second part is what it does to the high school student. It says you don't need to protest; you don't need to write your congressman; you don't need to do any of the things that citizens do, because everything's getting better all the time.

Well, every single textbook that I looked at says that they came across the Bering Strait during an Ice Age. It turns out they might have. It also turns out they might not have. And what we should therefore do is let students in on the fact that we don't know, that there's a controversy here and invite them to go research it themselves. ...

I feel like there is a tension in what you're saying because we do want to debate and understand where there's genuine uncertainty in history, but how do students discriminate among various sources of information? Especially in the age of the Internet and thousands of pages on any subject.

Well, I think there's one key question to be asked of any source, and that is "Why do you find it credible?" Now, a KKK site on American history is perfectly credible if you're asking the question "What does the KKK believe about the Civil War?" OK. If, on the other hand, you're asking, "Why did the Southern states secede?" Maybe you don't want to cite a KKK site.

Last fall, I decided not to assign a textbook for my African American history survey course, and elected to make the content completely free and digital. I hoped to find top-tier scholarship that equaled, or surpassed, the conventional textbooks assigned in such introductory courses. As I revealed this strategy to colleagues I found two reactions. First, many revealed they were moving in a similar direction, providing novel approaches for improving my content and suggesting ways to use social media in class discussions. The second response came from professors who had never considered this approach, and many asked that I write a retrospective on the course and share my syllabus. Regarding these latter points, I am providing the syllabus here.

As an instructor who teaches about social justice, racism, and collective resistance in an age of exorbitant tuition rates, I felt an obligation to pursue financial justice in the classroom. Indeed, an increasing percentage of people matriculating into institutions of higher education come from first-generation and/or underrepresented student populations, often financing their own education while balancing work, school, and familial responsibilities. Though I have little control over tuition rates or inflation, I wanted to provide my students some relief from the economic burdens of American higher education. Knowing I held creative control over my course content I could alleviate at least one financial drain. Purchasing the assigned books for each semester can be a daunting task.

Classes are broken down between lectures and small group reading analysis. Typically, where students look for specific themes in the reading from the night before or compare them to in class readings.

Readings are more deliberate and are focused on including many more perspectives. (Indigenous, enslaved, free person of color, oral histories, women, men, etc)
I have a short introductory passages, always under 2,000 words, and students are expected to spend most of their time with primary-source documents .

Publishers in the US, as elsewhere, want to sell as many books as possible and therefore seek to avoid offending the often-conservative state and local school boards that select textbooks. This leads to fairly bland volumes that say little about controversial topics like the Vietnam War, or that muddle any contentious message with multiple points of view. Nevertheless, even as publishers try to evade controversy, textbook authors, as they select words and images, make editorial choices that shape how students view specific wars and influence their stance toward the military and war in general.

With a graduate student Lacy Mitchell, I examined U.S. high school social studies textbooks published between 1970 and 2009. I found that in the early 1970s, during the last years of the Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath, descriptions of the war were mainly impersonal and presented the actions of American soldiers in neutral terms.

Decade by decade, the Vietnam War has been presented in increasingly negative terms. In our inventory of textbook items (paragraphs, photographs, student exercises) the percentage that presented the Vietnam War as glorious fell from 5% in 1970 to close to 0% in the 1990s, and it has remained at zero in subsequent decades. The share of items that present the war as hellish rose from 15% in 1970 to 33% in 2009. All the negative portrayals show the horror of the war through the personal experiences of American soldiers and focus on their deaths and suffering.

Photos of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam have also become increasingly graphic. In the 1960s and 1970s, photos show helicopters over Vietnamese terrain with no humans present and fully intact U.S. soldiers. Beginning in the 1980s, textbooks include more and more photos of booby traps designed to mangle the bodies of soldiers, bloody and bandaged soldiers, soldiers crying alone with captions describing their mourning of lost comrades, and disabled veterans. Soldiers are quoted directly describing their own suffering and trauma.

ONE DAY IN MARCH OF last year Leonard Tramiel, a balding, dark-bearded man of 45, sat alone in a science classroom in Milpitas, a middle-class community on the south end of San Francisco Bay. Having earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University and having made a bundle in Silicon Valley, Tramiel now taught occasionally around the Bay Area as a volunteer.

Savoring a few quiet moments before 30 eighth graders surged into the classroom, Tramiel opened their astronomy textbook, Prentice Hall's Exploring The Universe, to the lesson for the day. Tramiel was surprised to see that Prentice Hall had inadvertently reversed two photographic images, giving a misleading impression of how the moon looks as it passes through its phases. Tramiel turned back a page. The book said that the moon probably had been born when a giant asteroid had struck the earth, tearing a chunk of material from the planet, and that the Pacific Ocean may be the hole left behind. What was this doing in a science textbook? The asteroid theory hadn't been taken seriously for over 30 years. Tramiel turned back another page and read that the far, or dark, side of the moon had been photographed for the first time by the Lunar Orbiter, a U.S. space probe. He knew for a fact that the Soviets had taken those first photographs.

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