It was not just that we read them before we understood that not everything that is printed is the truth, or the whole truth.
Thaddeus Stevens has been reconstructed—his character changed, as it were, from black to white, from cruel and vindictive to persistent and sincere.
But now the texts have changed, and with them the country that American children are growing up into.
To stay in step with the cycles of "adoption" in school districts across the country, the publishers revised most of their own old texts or substitute new ones every three or four years.
The amount of space given to illustrations is far greater than it was in the fifties; in fact, in certain "slow-learner" books the pictures far outweigh the text in importance.
The book that is perhaps the most stark in its description of modern problems illustrate the horrors of nuclear testing with a pretty Ben Shahn picture of the Bikini explosion, and the potential for global ecological disaster with a color photograph of the planet swirling its mantle of white clouds.
The questions are the heart of the matter, for when they are carefully selected they force students to think much as historians think: to define the point of view of the speaker, analyze the ideas presented, question the relationship between events, and so on.
It was that they, much more than other books, had the demeanor and trappings of authority.
Some books, for instance, portray civil-rights legislation as a series of actions taken by a wise, paternal government; others convey some suggestion of the social upheaval involved and make mention of such people as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X.
After reporting that Mr. Gonzalez eventually went to college and law school, the book explains that "the melting pot idea hasn't worked out as some thought it would," and that now "some people say that the people of the United States are more like a salad bowl than a melting pot.
A fugitive slave about whom nothing seems to be known for certain except that he was a victim of the Boston massacre and thus became one of the first casualties of the American Revolution
In these books, history is clearly not a list of agreed-upon facts which must be ordered by the historians.
The surprise that adults feel in seeing the changes in history texts must come from the lingering hope that there is somewhere out there, an objective truth.
In addition to the traditional narrative histories，with their endless streams of facts, there are so-called "discovery," or " inquiry" texts, which deal with a limited number of specific issues in American history.
The Vikings, they say, preceded him to the New World, and after that the Europeans, having lost or forgotten their maps, simply neglected to cross the ocean again for five hundred years.
There was, it seemed, no print in comparing these visions with reality, since they were the public truth and were thus quite irrelevant to what existed and to what anyone privately believed.