“The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth”: Writing, Producing, and Using College-Level American History Textbooks

What are the choices and constraints they face, their sense of audience and market dynamics, the trade-offs between writing textbooks and doing other kinds of scholarly work? A coauthor of A People and a Nation, now in its seventh edition, Norton discusses how that pathbreaking book-the first major textbook to incorporate the new social history-came into being and how it has evolved over time. [...]we wanted to learn more about how instructors actually use textbooks in their courses. According to his analysis, many instructors rely almost exclusively on textbooks to supply curricular content in the survey-a tendency he deems worrisome.