TOW #6 The American Pageant

The American Pageant is an American History text book, written by David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas Bailey. The American Pageant is used widely across the United States for American History courses, including Wissahickon High School! Though mostly commonly used for AP and IB courses, the book is written at an eighth grade reading level, and is generally very easy to understand. The purpose of The Pageant, as is the purpose of any textbook, is to provide a mostly unbiased and interesting approach to history for a student, who assumedly has minimal to no prior knowledge of the subject.
The Pageant does it's best to be interesting, but it is still a textbook, and can be rather dry at times. The authors try to intersperse descriptive language to make the history seem more narrative. For example, in the chapter I was assigned to read the week (Chapter 8), the book describes General William Howe's personality: "Howe did not relish the rigors of winter campaigning. He evidently found more agreeable the bedtime company of his mistress, the wife of one of his subordinates-- a scandal which American satirists had a good deal of ribald fun." (152) While describing the affairs of General Howe does not directly help The Pageant achieve it's purpose (in the grand scheme of the American Revolution, Howe's scandal is relatively unimportant, and it is unlikely to show up on an AP exam), including this tidbit adds some drama to the text. It is an interesting fact that is likely to catch the reader's attention and stick in their brain. Subsequently, it can help serve as background information, and aide understanding of more important aspects of the text, for example, since I know Howe was inattentive and lazy, I can infer why his military strategy was rather ineffective. This narrative tone is used throughout chapters in an attempt to make the content more interesting for students.
The American Pageant also helps to alleviate boredom in the long text through its layout. The chapters are all further broken down into sections, allowing the reader to track their progress and pace themselves throughout the chapter. Also several pictures and primary source documents are included to break up the text, and make pages less intimidating with less text. I think this practice is only somewhat successful in making the textbook more interesting. While it does help to have a visual aide, I think many times students will skip over pictures and primary source documents in order to be done reading sooner.
The American Pageant is not an atrocity, but it is still a textbook. It tries its best to be interesting and unbiased, but is still lengthy and glosses over several tragedies. The book provides great background information, but with history it is always important to consider multiple sources. In APUSH we also read Zinn, which is a completely different approach to history. Neither is correct or incorrect, but as a reader one must be conscious of the purpose and context of the text before making conclusions about anything.