Teachers Author a History Textbook: Being in the Right Place at the Right Time
In achieving success, talent is overrated while persistence and luck are underrated.
That is the takeaway from the story I will tell of how I (and a co-author) wrote a U.S. history textbook in the late-1960s that sought to reform how teachers teach history and along the way had a few years of modest success. By the late-1970s, however, the text had largely disappeared from the marketplace.
Beginning at Glenville high school in Cleveland in the late-1950s and after I moved to Washington, D.C. to work at Cardozo high school in 1963, I developed instructional materials that incorporated primary sources on what was then called Negro history. Scott,Foresman published The Negro in America in 1964 (reissued in 1971 as The Black Man in America) as part of their “Problems in American History” series. The book introduced primary sources mixed with questions for students to answer in what was then called “The New Social Studies.”
In 1966, a Scott,Foresman editor contacted me and asked me if I would like to write a U.S. history textbook that would be a series of paperbacks and not the