Evaluating American Government Textbooks and Their Treatment of Global Issues

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most young Americans are woefully unprepared for the new global circumstances. The magnitude of the educational task is so great that adding new international affairs or foreign cultures courses to the traditional undergraduate curriculum will not suffice. The challenge can best be met if existing courses that students already take in large numbers can be infused with appropriate global perspectives. Such courses represent important points of leverage for reaching the mass of college students. A recent survey has reviewed fifty -one of the leading textbooks for the introductory course in American national government-a course taken by large numbers of American undergraduate students-to ascertain the extent of the treatment of the subject from a global perspective. These fifty-one were selected from an estimated 100 textbooks currently available in this country for the introductory American national government course. They were primarily chosen on the basis of a 1979 study published by the American Political Science Association which identified fifty of these textbooks published since 1976 as the most actively marketed by nearly twenty publishers. Presumably these are also the most widely used. Omitted from the top fifty of the 1979 study were eight titles that were either going out of print or were not available to the writer. Added to that initial