Rewriting Textbooks as History Unfolds

“On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans across the nation gathered in grief. Many people wept openly. Some held candles. On the steps of the Capitol, the leaders of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, stood shoulder to shoulder, united in a new resolve to fight evil ....”

--from “The American Nation,” a Prentice Hall eighth-grade textbook that will be in classrooms next fall.

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Frank Tangredi, a senior editor at Prentice Hall, was at a candlelight vigil in New York the night of Sept. 11. There he heard a father tell his son, “You’ll be reading about this in your history books.” Tangredi knew he had to act quickly: Prentice Hall had 15 new history and social studies texts already set to go to the printer.

He e-mailed his writers and editorial colleagues. It was crunch time.

In Evanston, Ill., McDougal Littell, a division of Houghton Mifflin, also was ready to roll with a number of texts. “They were all written and illustrated. All the pages were set,” says Chris Johnson, the editorial director of social studies.

History is, of course, always being rewritten, and it was not the first time that writers and publishers of textbooks had found themselves scrambling on deadline to catch up. But the Sept. 11 attacks and events that followed presented a different challenge: to write history as it was still unfolding.

That set it apart from earlier events that had bumped up against deadlines, such as the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, the bombing of Kosovo, the impeachment of President Clinton and the cliffhanging 2000 presidential election. As Johnson put it, “With the impeachment, you knew there was going to be an end to the story. Here we had no idea. This must have been like when books were going to press on Dec. 7, 1941.”

Something would have to give to accommodate hundreds of words of new text, as well as photographs. That meant trimming back passages that suddenly seemed less important.

Then there was the big question: Was it too early to pinpoint Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the terrorist attacks?

On Sept. 11, Michael Stoff, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of Prentice Hall’s “The American Nation,” received a Tangredi e-mail, apologizing for intruding on that horrible day and “telling me we’d have to begin thinking about all this.” Stoff would have two weeks to revise his text.

In the days that followed, the two talked about recasting the book’s final chapter (1970-2001). Stoff says, “We cut some material on the Clinton efforts to resolve problems in the Middle East. We cut some material on South Africa.”

Stoff knew that “instant history is extremely tricky and has to be handled with great care. My approach was to try to place these events in historical context rather than try to depict them as a turning point. They may well be a turning point, but we don’t know that yet.”

As an example, he cites the Clinton impeachment. “That looked like a story of such magnitude, the idea that a president would be impeached for only the second time in U.S. history. Now, looking back on it a few years later, it seems to merit not nearly that sense of urgency or importance.”

Likewise, Stoff says, the importance of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath “is something historians can’t yet gauge.”

Because “The American Nation,” from Prentice Hall’s Pearson imprint, is for eighth-graders, he understood that these events “would mark their formative years, just as the Kennedy assassination marked mine.” Stoff finished the final revision days after the United States began bombing Afghanistan. He devotes several sentences to “trying to break down the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 into military, diplomatic and economic components.”

He opted not to mention Bin Laden but simply to state that “the United States targeted a terrorist network run by an extremist exile from Saudi Arabia.” Stoff says of Bin Laden, “Who knows how important he will be in the future? What’s more important, it seems to me, is the network.”

Having been in the textbook writing business for a decade, Stoff was reasonably unruffled by updating a book that was already in the final proofing stage. It wasn’t exactly “back to the drawing board,” he says, because he’d already written passages about terrorism and extremists’ reaction to the globalization of American culture. The challenge was to be cautious as “the facts seemed to be shifting beneath your feet.”

He wrote, “The hijackers were terrorists from the Middle East. As you read, the United States would often be called on to lead in resolving regional conflicts, but world leadership, as grief-stricken Americans learned on Sept. 11, would carry a terrible price.”

Johnson and writers and editors at McDougal Littell took different approaches in describing events for middle schoolers and for high schoolers. Middle school texts, he says, “put somewhat more emphasis on the rescue efforts and certainly the heroism of the firefighters and police officers.”

For high schoolers, “We provided more of a geopolitical approach to the whole topic of terrorism. One of the debates we had was whether we would name Osama bin Laden. We decided not to, but I think when we reprint the books early next year we will.” The American military response, not included because of deadline, also will be included in reprints.

McGraw-Hill, too, is focusing on the more positive in its elementary school texts--”patriotism and heroes,” says spokeswoman April Hattori. “We’re having a child psychologist review the copy to make sure it’s appropriate for that age level.”

The publishers face a Feb. 1 deadline for submitting books to Texas, a major buyer and one of about 20 states with centralized textbook adoption for all its school districts. For most, that meant going to press by early November. (California, the other major player, has statewide adoption for kindergarten through eighth grade only, but is not buying now, having done so in 1999.)

The books, which will be delivered to schools this summer, will be in the nation’s classrooms for an average of five to seven years.

To help teachers keep current, textbook publishers are posting supplemental materials on their Web sites, updating history as it unfolds. McDougal Littell is at work on a line of hardcover “nextexts,” which Johnson describes as “historical readers.” One will provide an examination of terrorism and will be available to schools in mid-March, with profits to go to one of the Sept. 11 relief funds.

In the next year or two, Johnson says, textbook publishers will be putting books online, enabling them to keep current. “The details are still being worked out,” he says, but there will be an arrangement whereby schools pay for access. He does not expect the printed page to become obsolete but to remain “the focus of the curriculum” for the foreseeable future.

As texts are updated, on the Web site and in reprints, Johnson says, the story will be expanded to include “the bombing of Afghanistan, the anthrax threat and God knows what else.”

Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council, a private group that monitors and reviews texts, speculates that down the road “publishers and editors will be emphasizing what Americans have in common, our national unity. That constitutes a change in tone and emphasis from the recent past. The ‘90s were the decade of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism’s future is an open question.”