Along the narrow, high-ceilinged corridors of the history department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, John Darger is making his rounds, knocking at the door of one historian after another, hawking his wares — albeit in a quiet, rather academic way.
The casually dressed, youthful-looking Darger is a textbook salesman for W.W. Norton, and, on this frigid Monday, he’s aiming to kindle interest in a new and very different American history text for college freshmen. The title is “Inventing America,” and it’s a work that casts the nation’s history in an unusual light — as a story of innovation.
The good news for Darger is that nearly every professor he visits this day is familiar with the book, having recently seen it reviewed in the New York Times.
That’s also the bad news.
“Oh, that’s the one that got trashed in the New York Times,” one of Darger’s potential customers says.
“You guys took a beating in the Times,” says another.
Yet, none of them rejects the book out of hand. Indeed, there’s a grudging respect for it. These are historians whose own textbooks and scholarly works rarely, if ever, find their way onto the book review pages of any daily newspaper. The simple fact that the Times — and, later, with a much more favorable critique, the Boston Globe — considered the textbook important enough to review is an indication of its significance.
With some 2.4 million freshmen entering U.S. colleges and universities each year, textbooks for the basic American history survey course are a big business in publishing, accounting for new book sales of something in the neighborhood of $25 million a year and millions more in used book purchases.
For a long time, those texts taught U.S. history as a series of diplomatic crises, presidential fiats, wars and near-wars. It was, in essence, the story of the rich and powerful.
In the 1960s, however, historians began to look beyond the gilded class and to examine the lives of everyday people — the have-nots, the newly arrived and the Average Joes and Josephines. This approach, which sought to include information on every major group, from Latinos to Mormons, from factory workers to slum dwellers, was called social history.
And this new thinking reached college freshmen in 1982 with the publication by Houghton Mifflin of “A People and a Nation” by Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton and a host of other scholars. “It really broke new ground,” said Jean Woy, editor of social studies and history textbooks at Houghton Mifflin.
It also sold a lot of copies — hundreds of thousands, according to Moy — and spawned a generation of imitators. “It’s been a very successful textbook,” Moy said. And she noted that, despite new competition from “Inventing America,” Hougton Mifflin has no plans to make radical changes in its veteran workhorse, for which a seventh edition is now in preparation.
“You don’t want to change something that has worked so well for years,” Moy said. “There’s plenty of room for different approaches.”
But the authors of “Inventing America” — Merritt Roe Smith, Pauline Maier, Alexander Keyssar and Daniel J. Kevles — argue that their book is as much of a breakthrough in American history texts as “A People and a Nation” was two decades ago. “This is the debut of a new generation of history textbook,” Keyssar said.
And word has been getting around. At last weekend’s annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, Steve Forman, the book’s editor at Norton, found interest in “Inventing America” high. “There’s great word-of-mouth,” Forman said. “A guy from Harvard Business School picked up the book at our table and said, `So this is the book I’ve been hearing so much about.'” Then he asked Forman to send him a copy.
Already, he said, 51 history professors have chosen “Inventing America” for use in the spring semester. “Fifty-one adoptions at this stage is a very, very good sign for the book,” Forman said. “This is the book the profession is talking about.”
Smith, an expert in the history of technology and science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the moving force behind “Inventing America.” In an interview, he said he’d seen the need for such a work ever since he taught the freshman American history course at Ohio State University in the early 1970s.
Reordering students’ thinking
“Innovation has been central to the American experience,” he said, “and, yet, when you read our textbooks, you learn very little about those themes. These [college] kids live in a society that has surrounded them with new technology. Yet, they understand very little about the context in which these technologies developed.”
A decade ago, Smith was invited to give a lecture to a group of historians of technology at a conference sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds scientific, economic and technological research. During those remarks, he mentioned in passing that he was disappointed with American history textbooks because they gave short shrift to science and technology.
Two weeks later, much to his surprise, Smith received a call from foundation officials, offering to bankroll the writing of a history text that would give technology and science their due.
In undertaking that task, though, Smith and his trio of co-authors found that they were not only bringing new balance to history-telling but also — unusual for textbook writers — discovering new insights into how the country developed and evolved.
“We are reconfiguring American history,” Smith said. “We are shedding new light on things that were not well-understood in history texts before. Ours is a work of synthesis. But, even in a work of synthesis, there are new connections you can make.”
Among those new connections: An examination by Maier of how experimentation by the states in drafting their own constitutions laid the groundwork for the writing of the U.S. Constitution, and a section Smith wrote showing the links between the rise of evangelical religion and the building of large transportation networks in the first half of the 19th Century.
Blending science, technology
What makes “Inventing America” intriguing — at least, as an idea — to book review editors and history professors alike is that it’s an attempt to weave together the usual strands of politics, culture and everyday life with those of science and technology, all within the context of experimentation and invention.
“There’s a certain homogenization that takes place in many of these textbooks,” Eric Arnesen, the chair of the UIC history department, tells Darger as the W.W. Norton salesman makes his rounds. “What you see in so many textbooks is a flatness. They’re trying to check off these little boxes.”
Arnesen’s colleague, Perry Duis, notes as he pages through a paperback version of the first half of the book, “This is an aspect of American history that’s been relegated to the dust bin and needs to be emphasized.” (Depending on the college bookstore, “Inventing America” sells for around $77 as a hardcover, and $60 for each of two volumes in the paperback edition.)
“Some colleagues of mine,” Duis tells Darger, “relegate technology to dead-white-man territory. To them, it’s the handmaiden of business, and, therefore, the enemy.”
Yet, the problem that Sylvia Nasar raised with “Inventing America” in the review she wrote for the New York Times was that the book’s authors weren’t pro-business and pro-capitalism enough.
“In keeping with their dismissive attitude toward the nuts and bolts of business, the authors assign little importance to markets, property rights or the profit motive,” wrote Nasar, the author of “A Beautiful Mind,” the biography of mathematics prodigy John Nash.
Smith and his colleagues, she complained, “don’t consider that profit might play a role in motivating innovators to bring their inventions to market, or that competition might have a part in the `economic miracle’ casually mentioned [in the text].”
When Arnesen brings up the review to Darger, the salesman — looking and sounding for all the world like a graduate student — blithely dismisses it as “hogwash,” the judgment of a financial journalist, not a historian.
In a letter to the editor in the Times, the authors argued that Nasar’s review was “ideologically driven,” and that “a book written from her uncritically pro-business stance would be neither a balanced textbook nor good history.”
Making the past intelligible
A more favorable reading of the new book came from Diana Muir, an economist and ecologist, in a review for the Boston Globe:
“The power of `Inventing America’ is that it makes the past intelligible in ways that are useful for the future. Confronted with limitless acres of good farmland remote from any means of carrying grain to market, Americans did not become subsistence farmers. They built canals to connect their farms to the coast, and when England invented the steam engine, America invented the steamboat to make the great rivers navigable. If students take only one lesson from this text, it will be that even the most daunting problems can be solved.”
In his conversations with the UIC professors, Darger stresses the new insights to be found in “Inventing America,” as well as the credentials of its authors and the freshnness of the innovation theme. And his listeners hear him out with something of an open mind.
Historian Michael Perman says, “Most textbooks, as you know, are difficult to read because they don’t have a theme.”
But there are other issues that come into play, such as the sheer length of the volume — 1,086 pages in hardcover; about 600 each for the two paperback volumes. Duis tells Darger, “The problem is: How much do they really read? And remember?”
As Richard Fried, an expert in the Cold War era, slowly turns the pages of the book, he is impressed with its illustrations. “You’ve actually managed to find some non-cliched pictures,” he says to Darger. “Somebody was trying to be original.”
But then, Fried says, “Uh-oh, this book is not going to work.” He says it half-playfully but there is also an edge of seriousness.
He points to a page in the text that cites a history of McCarthyism by Ellen Schrecker. “I disagree with her. She’s a little too apologetic about the Communist Party,” Fried says. The authors shouldn’t have listed Schrecker’s work, he says. “It should be mine.”
Fried takes out his copy of the Mary Beth Norton textbook, looks in the appendix and finds his book listed there. “OK, I’m in here. It’s still in the charmed circle.”
Following Darger’s two days of sales calls at UIC, the first history professor there to adopt “Inventing America” was Burton Bledstein, who will use the book for his American history survey course in the spring semester, beginning Monday.
Bledstein said he selected the new book not for its stress on innovation, but because it provides “a mature balance” between the positive-spin of political history and the “hypercritical” negative spin of social history. “One of the strengths of the book is it focuses on what happened, and it balances it,” Bledstein said. “It’s a nice piece of work, well thought-out.”
Results in classroom
At Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, Susan Rugh, a social historian trained at the University of Chicago, has been using “Inventing America” for her U.S. history survey course during the fall semester, which ended in mid-December. She believes her students are learning more because of the book.
“I was amazed at how well they did on the first exam — better than I’ve ever had a class do,” she said. In addition, quizzes and classroom discussions show the students “are reading it more” than would be expected.
“What I like best about [the book],” Rugh said, “is their approach to political history and innovation. Their discussion of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is brilliant — that they didn’t spring full-blown from the minds of the Founders, that they were based on experiments. I like the way it gives to students this broader view, showing people in the past trying to figure out the world and having choices.”
And the students?
Well, on comment cards Rugh distributed, most gave the text high grades, describing it as readable, informative and interesting.
There were a few, though, who found fault. The textbook, they complained, gave too much attention to two subjects — technology and science.
Evolution of innovation in America
In “Inventing America,” the four scholar-authors look at how innovation on many levels has played a role in shaping the history of the United States. Here are four examples:
On the establishment of a new nation:
“The creation of a workable republic became, in fact, the most fascinating challenge of the age, a form of innovation that outdistanced all others. `You and I, dear friend,’ John Adams wrote the Virginian George Wythe in 1776, `have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. . . . When, before the present epocha, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?’ . . .
“In the end, Americans’ contributions to the science of government transformed the independence movement into a revolution. . . . The Americans’ struggle with Britain acquired broad historical significance only because it was [according to Thomas Paine] `accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practices of governments.’ The Revolution also set in motion social and economic transformations whose effects would be felt far in the future. In those ways, too, the American Revolution became a revolution in the modern sense of the word, not an occurrence that moved a people back along a cyclical path like the revolution of the sun or the moon, which the word previously implied, but a traumatic event that shifted the course of liberty in a radically new direction.”
On the American corporation:
“The invention of the American corporation was the legal innovation of the 1780s that, along with the creation of government under a written constitution, had the most far-reaching implication for the future economic development of the United States. . . .
“The handful of immediate postwar incorporation for profit-seeking ventures [for such projects as bridges, factories and banks] . . . were relatively large-scale efforts, requiring capital beyond the means of individual Americans. Incorporation allowed such projects to be financed by a large number of investors, who became members of the corporation by buying shares in a public subscription. Later, any profits would be divided on a per-share basis. Such a way of massing capital was well suited to the United States, where wealth was relatively broadly distributed and even the greatest fortunes were modest compared to those of Europe. . . . In short, the corporation provided a way of addressing Americans’ need for capital just as machines gave hope of addressing their perennial labor scarcity.”
On the Second Great Awakening:
“The Second Great Awakening offered an optimistic and democratic theology. In contrast to the older Calvinist viewpoint that people were predestined to heaven or hell and could be saved only if God had `elected’ them, the new evangelical theology emphasized individual free will and, most important, the idea that everyone was equal in the eyes of God. . . .
“As religious sects multiplied, denominationalism [the phenomenon of many religious groups competing with one another for members] imprinted itself on American culture in unprecedented ways. This was most apparent in upstate New York, where the Erie Canal and the rapid industrial transformation that accompanied it helped to kindle one of the most momentous religious revivals in American history. There, the fires of religion burned with such intensity that the region became known as `the burned over district.’
“Along the towpaths and boomtowns of the Erie could be found all the kinds of people that white evangelical Protestants most feared and wanted to `reform:’ Catholics, immigrants, paupers, and other `heathens,’ and sometimes even the primary agents of material progress, merchants and manufacturers. Then, as the transportation revolution spread westward into Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and beyond, the agencies of Protestant religion and moral reform, collectively known as the `Benevolent Empire,’ moved with it. The geographies of religion, reform, and the market economy were part of the same westward-expanding process. Industrialization and reform were closely aligned with the new technologies of the era, especially what Daniel Webster referred to as `the mighty agent, steam.'”
On the impact of technology in the late 19th Century:
“Indeed, what transpired during these years was not just the growth of new industries but the emergence of new technological systems, networks of interrelated products and devices that structures economic, social, and even political activity. People came to depend on these systems, to perceive them as indispensable to their own lives. The railroad network, for example, made long-distance transportation much faster and cheaper than it ever had been, and it shaped expectations accordingly. Not only were goods shipped distances that had been unimaginable a few decades earlier, but mail that had taken months to deliver now took weeks or even days. . . .
“Although some regarded the telephone as a `scientific toy’ that could `never be a practical necessity,’ telephone use surged after 1894, when independent companies blocked into the industry and promoted residential telephones, first in urban and then in rural areas. By 1920, there were 13 million telephones in the United States, and the ability to geographically separated individuals to hold conversations — something startling to nearly everyone in the 1870s — had become commonplace. `A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston,’ reported one Massachusetts newspaper.”
