Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>

NPR's Studio 360 Looks at Buffalo Bill and Western Myths

Randall Stephens

This week NPR's acclaimed Studio 360 series looked at Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and some of the enduring myths of the West. The program explored the legend of this major American celebrity and tracked the career of the western, from dime novels to modern incarnations like HBO's Deadwood. A particularly interesting line the that the Studio 360 program took was the decline in the popularity of the western in the 1960s, and the western's reemergence in altered form. Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) would have been nearly sacrilegious in an earlier era. A drunk, ego-maniacal Buffalo Bill (played by Paul Newman) staggers pathetically through this weird carnival of a film.

Buffalo Bill "was the most famous American in the world," says Studio 360, "a showman and spin artist who parlayed a buffalo-hunting gig into an entertainment empire. William F. Cody’s stage show presented a new creation myth for America, bringing cowboys, Indians, settlers, and sharpshooters to audiences who had only read about the West in dime novels. He offered Indians a life off the reservation — reenacting their own defeats. Deadwood producer David Milch explains why the myth of the West still resonates; a Sioux actor at a Paris theme park loves playing Sitting Bull; and a financial executive impersonates Buffalo Bill, with his wife as Annie Oakley."

Listen to the program here.

See Buffalo Bill-related posters, photographs, and more from the Library of Congress.

Watch the full episode of PBS's Buffalo Bill (American Experience).

Hear the Beatles rehearsal of the Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (1968) . . . unrelated, but excellent.