Textbook Questions

I spent a  little time this week thinking about textbooks (specifically High School History textbooks). Some important questions occurred to me. 

First, why don't any of the History textbooks used at my school have any citations in them or a bibliography at the end?

Any good non-fiction book (excepting autobiographies) has footnotes or endnotes and often a bibliography at the end. Why do the writers and publishers of High School textbooks get a free pass on this? Having read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I am suspicious of textbooks (American history textbooks in particular) and I think they should be made to show where the information they claim as factual actually came from.

Second, why are American History textbooks so much bigger than IGCSE Modern World History textbooks?

For comparison I looked at American Nation (Holt Reinhart) and International Relations 1914-1995 (Oxford). 

American Nation is an impressive 960 pages and weighs in at about 5 pounds. Ordering it from Amazon will set you back about $120. By comparison International Relations (my choice for 10th grade IGSCE history) is a meagre 216 pounds and weighs a bit more than a pound. I mention the weight only because of the bulging backpacks I see kids lugging around campus.

So, basically it takes Holt 1000 pages to cover the 400 year history of one country (the AP World History textbook is about the same size) while it takes Oxford 200 pages to cover one century of world history. How is this possible?

The answer seems to lie in the fact that the IGCSE syllabus does not attempt to cover all or even most of the breadth of material for the 20th Century. Instead, the aim is to teach historical and critical thinking skills by focusing on a few major themes in depth and using primary sources. The textbook itself is more a collection of sources than anything else. 

In contrast, the U.S. History curriculum at my school is a fact-heavy, chronological behemoth, just like the textbook. Truthfully, I can't even bring myself to read the textbook and I love history.  Personally, I would like to have the class read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States instead.

Thirdly, with the massive amount of totally free online content available, why do we even have textbooks?

I have followed a ton of links tweeted by history teachers I follow. Those links have taken me to many amazing sites with more current, relevant and interesting information than can be found in any one textbook that I've ever seen. Most of the sources included in the IGCSE textbooks are available online and the massive amount of information in the American History textbooks is also readily available.

Overall, I find myself questioning both the reliability and the usefulness of high school history textbooks. I have visions of students or classes constructing their own wiki textbooks online (with proper citations of course), but I have a ways to go before I tackle that challenge.