Five-sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. Something has gone very wrong with our system. Many think that high school students hate history.
Many teachers abandon the overstuffed textbooks and construct their own history courses.
Errors in history textbooks, the author also wrote, often go uncorrected partly because the history professor does not bother to review textbooks. He died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring, American history would have been very different. The first mistake of textbooks is to underplay previous explorers. People from other continents had reached America many times before 1492.