Confessions of a Textbook Writer

By Alan MacEachern

Final yr, an electronic mail knowledgeable me of a dying. Two, truly. High Hat would now not publish Origins: Canadian Historical past to Confederation or Destinies: Canadian Historical past since Confederation as both print or e-books. These twin textbooks, as soon as as a lot staples of Canadian historical past survey programs as, properly, the staples thesis, had been being discontinued attributable to low demand. Origins had met its future.

OriginsDestinies

Origins and Destinies first appeared in 1988, co-written by three fortysomething white male professors: R.D. Francis (College of Calgary), Richard Jones (Université Laval), and Donald B. Smith (College of Calgary). Over the subsequent three many years, the books bounced from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston to Harcourt to Nelson and eventually to High Hat, every writer discovering ample promise of latest Canadian historical past college students to justify new printings and new editions. My colleague Robert Wardhaugh – a fortysomething white male professor – signed as much as revise the seventh editions singlehandedly in 2012. I joined him for the eighth in 2016, within the pursuits of variety: I used to be fifty.[1]

Why did I signal on? One phrase: speedboat. OK, not likely: whereas there are tales of profs getting wealthy off the proceeds of first-year psychology textbooks, Canadian historical past is just not fairly so profitable. I’ve made extra throughout seven years of textbook royalties than I’ve from a profession of college press royalties – which isn’t saying a lot – however a single yr as a college administrator would have introduced a higher pay bump.

Actually, I grew to become a textbook creator for a number of causes, a very powerful being the rationale all of us write: the potential of altering individuals’s minds. By reaching probably dozens of professors and 1000’s and 1000’s of scholars, I hoped that I might redirect all the Canadian historic enterprise a bit of – particularly by injecting into the books extra data and opinion associated to my fields of experience, environmental historical past and Atlantic Canada. Conversely, I additionally knew that in revising these textbooks, I might soak up much more in regards to the Canadian area, which I might plow again into my educating and analysis. What’s extra, a number of years earlier I had known as for all Canadian historians to contemplate writing a historical past that was as massive, geographically and temporally, as what they train, and this was a approach to put my cash the place my mouth was.[2] And the ultimate motive for writing these textbooks? I used to be requested.[3] I’m by no means requested to do a lot, and this appeared like a approach to elevate my profile within the Canadian historical past neighborhood.

The method of writing the eighth editions of Origins and Destinies was each extra fulfilling and considerably uglier than I had anticipated. On the one hand, it was thrilling to inject new findings and concepts right into a narrative that you just knew could be disseminated to historical past college students throughout Canada. I appreciated, for instance, the prospect to cite climatologist Kenneth Hare in 1988 on local weather change or to advance the Lac-Mégantic derailment as a defining second in our historical past this century.[4] Typically revising historical past meant revising only a few phrases. Extending “The new dominion drove the First Nations to the point of starvation and sickness,” by including “carrying out a policy of ‘cultural genocide’”[5] felt essential, although I remorse – in reality, can’t actually clarify – these citation marks round cultural genocide.

However, I discovered firsthand that textbooks are like legal guidelines and sausages: it’s finest to not see them being made. Engaged on Destinies first, Wardhaugh and I submitted an extensively revamped model, solely to be advised by the writer that we had achieved an excessive amount of, and that it had not budgeted for wholesale structure modifications. A few of our edits by no means made it into the ultimate product, strictly for business causes. When engaged on Origins subsequent, we primarily needed to negotiate the pace at which historical past would change – no multiple hundred intensive edits per quantity! The bare objective was to make simply sufficient modifications to justify a brand new version and, the market keen, a brand new version after that.

My work on Origins and Destinies seemingly did elevate my profile within the Canadian historical past neighborhood – however maybe not in a optimistic method. I’d forgotten, till Twitter jogged my memory, that many historians have a deep-seated antipathy to textbooks. Perhaps it’s the singular and single-minded narrative. Perhaps it’s the price to college students. Perhaps it’s that total literatures are routinely squeezed into a number of paragraphs or strains, or bypassed altogether. Perhaps it’s that the authors are, essentially, so usually writing past their direct experience. Perhaps it’s the longstanding dominance of middle-aged white guys available in the market. Perhaps it’s the speedboat.

So with Google and Wikipedia having eaten away at textbooks’ utility this century, with professors much less accepting of single-narrative interpretations of the previous (and fewer anticipating that college students will truly learn one thousand pages of assigned textual content), and with college students much less keen to buy textbooks (and with scores of locations to attain them on-line), the tip of Origins and Destinies is a symptom of the historical past survey textbook’s demise– to which many historians will say good riddance. I can sympathize with that standpoint.

But my sense is that whereas historians routinely disparage survey textbooks, we additionally lean closely on them, as a result of what makes a textbook suspect additionally makes it indispensable: it presents a single-narrative interpretation of the previous. That is helpful in our personal writing – though we keep away from citing textbooks, due to the stigma – however it’s significantly helpful in our educating. A textbook presents a basis on which to construct. However that doesn’t imply we undertake it slavishly. Actually, we deal with its actual and perceived flaws as a function, not a bug. The textbook’s existence implies that we are able to deconstruct and re-present moments within the historical past it tells – and accomplish that to a level we couldn’t if we needed to assemble all that historical past from scratch.

In order a lot as we malign textbooks, my guess is that Canadian historians nonetheless maintain one shut at hand when getting ready a category. More and more, it’s more likely to be John Douglas Belshaw’s open-access two-volume Pre-Confederation and Publish-Confederation Canadian Historical past, which, as far as I do know, are the one new university-level Canadian historical past textbooks produced this century.[6] Belshaw’s books are on-line, free, keyword-searchable, and – price mentioning – actually good. I simply want there have been extra like them. However with the single-narrative historical past textbook in decline, and figuring out how a lot time, cash, and energy needs to be invested in making one, I doubt that there will probably be. Canadian historical past will turn into extra atomized, and we should do extra of the work ourselves in making sense of it. Oh properly, no less than we’ll have AI to assist us.

Alan MacEachern teaches Historical past at Western College.

[1] I’m being facetious, in fact. When Nelson was batting across the thought of ninth editions, Wardhaugh and I advised the writer that it was time for the texts to be utterly blown up and rewritten by students who didn’t appear to be us. Nelson was so gained over by our anti-pitch that they invited us to remain on.

[2] “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada,” ActiveHistory, 2012.

[3] Wardhaugh entrapped me into working with him by referring to hockey participant Sidney Crosby within the seventh version of Destinies as “Sydney Crosbie.” It felt like a cry for assist. Destinies, seventh ed., 584.

[4] Destinies, eighth ed., 549 and 589.

[5] Destinies, seventh ed., 33; and Destinies, eighth ed., 33. This resolution was not taken calmly, figuring out that the textbooks’ authentic authors could properly have vehemently opposed such wording.

[6] Thomas Peace and Sean Kheraj’s Open Historical past Seminar: Canadian Historical past is a group of primary-source paperwork adopted by interpretations by historians.

—

Beforehand Revealed on activehistory.ca with Artistic Commons License

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