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Reflections of a Longtime Textbook Author; or, History Revised, Revised—and Revised Again
Mary Beth Norton
| About three decades ago, I agreed to join a textbook team being organized for Houghton Mifflin by my friend and former University of Connecticut colleague Tom Paterson. When I signed the contract for what became A People and a Nation (APAN), it never crossed my mind that I would still be writing and rewriting the same book well into the twenty-first century, nor that our book would reshape the entire field of American history survey textbooks. |
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We—Tom, myself, Howard Chudacoff, Bill Tuttle, and, at the initial planning stage, John Blassingame—knew we wanted to write a textbook different from any then on the market. Already friends before we became a writing team, we had all attended graduate school in the 1960s. There we had been influenced by the growing emphasis on social history and by a critical stance toward American development generally and American foreign policy in particular. As young associate professors, we were all regularly teaching the survey course, and we liked none of the available texts, which uniformly stressed political, economic, and traditional diplomatic history. Therefore, from the outset we planned a different type of textbook. |
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In the mid-1970s the few social history texts on the market were all quirky in one way or another. Adopting any one of them would require an instructor largely to remake a survey course. We wanted to write a book that would be traditional in organization but untraditional in content—one that employed a standard chronological structure and included politics yet focused on the experiences of ordinary people and paid significant attention to race and gender. We planned a narrative that covered such subjects continuously, not episodically. Each of us brought a different scholarly emphasis to the project, and we thought it important to integrate our own pioneering research and analytical perspectives into the book. For instance, my growing interest in women's history led me to the belief, welcomed by my coauthors, that we needed to incorporate extensive discussions of women and the family throughout the book. |
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We made a number of decisions at the very beginning that have continued to affect the text ever since. We concurred that APAN belonged to all of us and that we would not be proprietary about our individual chapters. Every edition would be planned collectively. To the extent possible, we would read and comment on others' drafts, and we would not pull our punches if we saw a reason to criticize. We would share our areas of topical expertise by directing the others to relevant scholarship. We all detested the boxed sidebars that repeatedly interrupted the narratives of so many other texts, in part because those sidebars were often the sole vehicles for the incorporation of nontraditional material. We vowed to create as seamless a narrative as possible and to avoid such distracting features. |
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We planned to begin each chapter with an opening vignette focusing on a person or a group of people, using their story to introduce subsequent themes. We insisted that illustrations be contemporary and appropriate to the time period, a decision especially important for me because textbooks at the time often used misleading nineteenth-century pictorial reconstructions to illustrate colonial or revolutionary scenes. We would help select the illustrations, and we would write the captions ourselves rather than having them drafted by in-house editors; thus the pictures and captions too would become part of our comprehensive narrative. |
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