The rich irony in Virginia’s history textbook error
There is rich historic irony in the news that a textbook given to Virginia’s fourth-graders wrongly claims that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War: The process by which textbooks are adopted by some states was initiated after Southern states decided they did not want children reading the North’s version of the conflict. As reported in today's Washington Post by my colleague Kevin Sieff, the book “Our Virginia: Past and Present,” used by Virginia students for the first time last month, was written by an author who is not a trained historian and who said she found the information about black Confederate solders on the Internet. The author, Joy Masoff, has penned other works including "Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" and "Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments." (You can’t make up this stuff.)
