Consensus and Contradiction in Textbook Treatments of the Sixties

Abstract

Working as a free-lance development editor on (nonhistory) textbooks over past five years, I've learned something of how college texts are written, edited, and marketed. (A development editor plays no role in commissioning or shaping general direction of a text but acts as an internal coordinator of reviewing and rewriting process.) Most obviously, they are produced in a completely different fashion than scholarly monographs. Authorship does remain an important factor, however, both because reputation of major scholars helps sell textbooks and because college-division editors have no illusions that these books can be written by computers. But all textbooks are consciously assembled, vetted, and packaged to a considerable extent by people other than titular authors -no surprise to hundreds of professors in every discipline who are routinely invited to review manuscripts for a modest fee. It is this reviewing process, largely an unscientific form of market testing, that indicates central impulse of textbook publishing: valid comparison for any text is immediate competition. There is nothing submerged about these concerns. The most important question in standard questionnaires sent to reviewers is final one, Will you consider adoption of over your present text? To secure a sufficient number of Yes responses to this question, editors who commission textbooks seek to balance originality and familiarity. Does a given manuscript cover same material as its rivals, as well as they do or even better? Does it establish itself as innovative through a new approach that market may or may not warrantin other words, is it a mainstream or a niche book, or can it be both? Most important, does it suit a typical teacher at one standard level of college teaching (elite liberal arts college or major public university, small state campus or religious school, or community college)? I refer to conditions under which textbooks are written because they help explain most obvious fact about them: they tend to be remarkably similar in what is and what is not included; how an incident, person, or occasion is described; and in sequence used to establish relationships among events. In case of what we call the sixties, a category with a personal resonance for most authors, as well as for current political discourse, this conventionality takes on a distinctive