By the Book: Assessing the Place of Textbooks in U.S. Survey Courses

Daniel J. Cohen

In a round table published in the Journal of American History four years ago, professors from ten different colleges and universities spoke of the thoughtful, creative ways they approached the design of their American history survey courses. Most suggested that the textbook was of secondary importance, mainly used to supply background information to students, and they highlighted the pedagogical role of additional readings. Yet a study of nearly eight hundred syllabi posted on the World Wide Web reveals that the round table discussion may not be representative of how the survey is taught at most colleges and universities in the United States. Many U.S. history instructors appear to take a more pedestrian, by-the-book approach. They depend heavily on a textbook, on a textbook-based course's favorite type of graded work—the examination—and on the conventional ways of teaching American history that a textbook enshrines. Those findings lend a dark tone to the proclamation that Sara Evans and Roy Rosenzweig made in introducing the "Textbooks and Teaching" section of this journal in 1992: "Textbooks are the single most important written source through which college students learn about the past."1	1
The proliferation of syllabi on the Web presents for the first time the possibility of gaining a comprehensive picture of how history survey courses are taught and how textbooks are used in them. Since all documents on the Web, including posted syllabi, use text that is machine readable—and thus swiftly locatable and searchable—we can now assemble and analyze a substantial collection of course materials through electronic means. To exploit that possibility, in 2002 I wrote some experimental software, now called the Syllabus Finder, to locate, scan, and store syllabi from the Web. Thus far the software has found and tagged over three hundred thousand syllabi—probably the largest set of syllabi ever cataloged. Freely available on the Center for History and New Media Web site, the Syllabus Finder allows one to look up courses on specific topics, narrow or broad, to examine how history is taught at thousands of educational institutions, and to see which courses assign a certain primary or secondary source.2	2
The Syllabus Finder, a free Web site that has cataloged over three hundred thousand syllabi posted online, allows instructors to search for courses on specific topics and to study how history is taught across the country. See <http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/>.
To examine the role of textbooks in teaching the U.S. history survey, in early July 2004 I fed into the Syllabus Finder a list of forty-one titles that account for virtually all college-level American history textbook sales. The program located 792 different survey courses, taught at 462 different educational institutions, that used those textbooks. (A secondary, broader search estimated that only 5–10% of American history survey courses do not assign a textbook.) Multiple sections of the same course at a single university were cataloged as distinct courses when the section leaders designed their own syllabi using individually chosen textbooks. Multiple sections with identical syllabi and textbooks were pared down to a single record so as not to skew the data. Similarly, I cataloged only the most recent version of a syllabus when a course taught by the same professor appeared for multiple years. The syllabi range in time from a single 1995 course to 258 syllabi from the first half of 2004. (Although instructors have probably removed some older syllabi from the Web, the volume of course materials online has clearly exploded. My research shows that it has almost doubled each year since 1997.)	. . .