Today's Western and World Civilization College Texts: A Review

Abstract

PERHAPS THE MOST widespread and influential of histories are those aimed at college freshmen: the Western or World Civilization texts.Three to four hundred thousand copies are sold yearly to mostly young students with impressionable minds. Curiously, however, these books are rarely reviewed. Consequently the harried teacher must often select texts on the basis of advertisements containing edited hyperbolic quotes from readers or users, flashy blurbs, or dust jackets devised by the publisher to promote sales. It is to these dedicated teachers that this article is principally addressed. The unsatisfactory state of the American history texts, especially in high schools and lower grades, has recently been vividly portrayed by Pulitzer Prize winner Frances Fitzgerald's America Revised (Boston, 1979). What she says about the bland uniformity, trendy revisions, and preference for standard lists of names and topics rather than for analyses applies almost as much to Western and World Civilization college texts as to the American history texts she had reviewed. Her preference for the problem approach is more suitable for the briefer, more familiar U.S. history. In addition, much of her focus is on the lobbying of pressure groups for inserting or deleting items or interpretations of interest to their sponsors. This problem hardly exists in texts about European or World History in spite of the assertions to the contrary often, if not regularly, made by Marxists. Finally, U.S. texts contain less