Demand assumes that history is a narrative but not a seamless narrative, and history is furthermore, a process, in which she explicitly asks the student to participate. She presumes that students will buy translations of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristophanes' Wasps, Knights, and Clouds. Numerous Source Analysis sections ask students to consider pointed and specific analytical questions about sections of these works. The former category demands extraordinary feats of integration on the part of student and instructor, the latter utterly excludes the student from the historical process. In fact, in these days of coursepacks and Internet or on-campus network access to texts such as Perseus, one wonders how long source collections can survive as a genre.
New tools allow each instructor to custom tailor a set of source materials.
Even with the excerpts in Demand's book and with the other texts she recommends, most teachers will indeed still want to supplement with a coursepack or other sources to be read electronically. Such textbooks represent the end product of years of study and reflection on every bit of evidence, about which the student receives the author's final judgment. Herodotus, for example, has been thoroughly threshed to remove the chaff of anecdote and myth, leaving only the kernel of historical fact and incidentally leaving the student no reason to read the full text of the Histories. Demand's approach, on the other hand, is to present a book which is the beginning of a voyage of discovery, rather than a final destination. Hitherto, the only remotely comparable book has been A. R. Burn's History of Greece, inexpensive and with an attractive text but often frustratingly allusive, by now outdated, and with wretched maps and no illustrations.