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The Challenges and Rewards of Textbook Writing: An Interview with Alan Brinkley
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On Becoming a Textbook Author and Taking Over American History: A Survey | |
| When I was a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1970s, my adviser was Frank Freidel, one of the three original authors of American History: A Survey, a very successful book in the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after I received my Ph.D. in 1979, Frank approached me about the possibility of assuming responsibility for the book. To test out my suitability, he asked me first to revise his other textbook, America in the Twentieth Century, and it was a good experience. It was my own field, I was just starting out in the profession, and it was a great way to think through how I wanted to approach the twentieth century. I revised the book quite substantially. Everybody seemed to be reasonably pleased with it. Knopf published the book, and I went on to the big book.1 |
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By then, T. Harry Williams had died; Frank was no longer participating actively; and Richard Current, who was maintaining the book, no longer wanted to do so. The question was whether the book would just expire or whether we would try to keep it going. The book had a distinguished history and an established market. First published in 1959, it had been called A History of the United States and was twice as long as it is now—a huge book in the mold of the 1940s and 1950s when the massive two-volume Morison and Commager was the standard.2 At that time there were fewer universities; they were more elite and more traditional in their curriculum. It was realistic to expect students to read a huge two-volume textbook. But by the time A History of the United States was published, it was already almost obsolete. Two years later, the authors condensed it into what became American History: A Survey—with a title that was supposed to differentiate it from the longer book, which ceased to be published very soon after. |
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It may seem strange to think that a textbook that made its appearance in the late 1950s could survive through the extraordinary changes in scholarship we have seen since then. I think this book survived in part because it was written by people who were outside the northeastern, consensus school type of scholarship that dominated the 1950s. The three authors had all been graduate students together at the University of Wisconsin, and had, one way or another, all worked with William Best Hesseltine, to whom they dedicated the book. They were part of the old Wisconsin school Progressive tradition. The book was built around conflict, around battles over power. It wasn't polemical—it wasn't like reading Charles Beard—but it was different from the other textbooks of its time. And this made the book more compatible with the world of the 1960s and 1970s. |
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I took the book over in the early 1980s. Although there were lots of things missing, the basic framework actually held up reasonably well in the areas it did cover. It was not a book that needed to be jettisoned; it needed to be augmented and revised. It was, as most books of the time were, overwhelmingly a political and diplomatic history with a little intellectual history, and just a smidgeon of social and cultural history. It had to become more balanced. A People and a Nation had just come out, aimed at people who wanted the new social history. There was great pent-up demand for such a book, and there was an immediate and very strong response. But my book had an established constituency that I didn't want to alienate; it was a book for people who wanted to do the old history. It did very well in the Midwest, in the South, in Texas, in areas in which this old Progressive history was still alive. I knew then that one of the characteristics of the book would always be that it would take political history very seriously. But it couldn't be just political history; it had to incorporate very significant amounts of African American history, labor history, social history, and all of the other new areas of scholarship that had recently become important.3 |
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