Books, Arts & Manners: Battle of the Books

Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High-School History Texts, by Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman (Praeger, 200 pp., $55)

WHEN I started teaching sophomore U.S. history at an inner-city Catholic high school in Jersey City, I was allowed to choose between two textbooks to assign to the top class. The decision was mine, but I was encouraged by my department chairman and the principal to use the new set, bought just last year by a teacher who had then left. It was A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, by Mary Beth Norton and five colleagues. I opened the book randomly and saw a passage in bold type on birth control in the 1850s. “Significantly,” the text proclaimed, “the birth control methods women themselves controlled—douching, the rhythm method, abstinence, and abortion— were the ones that were increasing in popularity.”

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Mark Gerson

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Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High-School History Texts, by Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman (Praeger, 200 pp., $55)

WHEN I started teaching sophomore U.S. history at an inner-city Catholic high school in Jersey City, I was allowed to choose between two textbooks to assign to the top class. The decision was mine, but I was encouraged by my department chairman and the principal to use the new set, bought just last year by a teacher who had then left. It was A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, by Mary Beth Norton and five colleagues. I opened the book randomly and saw a passage in bold type on birth control in the 1850s. “Significantly,” the text proclaimed, “the birth control methods women themselves controlled—douching, the rhythm method, abstinence, and abortion— were the ones that were increasing in popularity.”