Confessions of a Textbook Author

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Alan MacEachern

Last year, an email informed me of a death. Two, actually. Top Hat would no longer publish Origins: Canadian History to Confederation or Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation as either print or e-books. These twin textbooks, once as much staples of Canadian history survey courses as, well, the staples thesis, were being discontinued due to low demand. Origins had met its destiny.

Origins and Destinies first appeared in 1988, co-written by three fortysomething white male professors: R.D. Francis (University of Calgary), Richard Jones (Université Laval), and Donald B. Smith (University of Calgary). Over the next three decades, the books bounced from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston to Harcourt to Nelson and finally to Top Hat, each publisher finding sufficient promise of new Canadian history students to justify new printings and new editions. My colleague Robert Wardhaugh – a fortysomething white male professor – signed up to revise the seventh editions singlehandedly in 2012. I joined him for the eighth in 2016, in the interests of diversity: I was fifty.[1]

Why did I sign on? One word: speedboat. OK, not really: while there are stories of profs getting rich off the proceeds of first-year psychology textbooks, Canadian history is not quite so lucrative. I have made more across seven years of textbook royalties than I have from a career of university press royalties – which is not saying much – but a single year as a university administrator would have brought a greater pay bump.

Really, I became a textbook author for a few reasons, the most important being the reason we all write: the possibility of changing people’s minds. By reaching potentially dozens of professors and thousands and thousands of students, I hoped that I could redirect the entire Canadian historical enterprise a little – especially by injecting into the books more information and opinion related to my fields of expertise, environmental history and Atlantic Canada. Conversely, I also knew that in revising these textbooks, I would absorb a lot more about the Canadian field, which I could plow back into my teaching and research. What’s more, a few years earlier I had called for all Canadian historians to consider writing a history that was as big, geographically and temporally, as what they teach, and this was a way to put my money where my mouth was.[2] And the final reason for writing these textbooks? I was asked.[3] I’m never asked to do much, and this seemed like a way to raise my profile in the Canadian history community.

The process of writing the eighth editions of Origins and Destinies was both more fulfilling and somewhat uglier than I had expected. On the one hand, it was exciting to inject new findings and ideas into a narrative that you knew would be disseminated to history students across Canada. I appreciated, for example, the chance to quote climatologist Kenneth Hare in 1988 on climate change or to advance the Lac-Mégantic derailment as a defining moment in our history this century.[4] Sometimes revising history meant revising just a few words. Extending “The new dominion drove the First Nations to the point of starvation and sickness,” by adding “carrying out a policy of ‘cultural genocide’”[5] felt important, though I regret – in fact, can’t really explain – those quotation marks around cultural genocide.

On the other hand, I learned firsthand that textbooks are like laws and sausages: it’s best not to see them being made. Working on Destinies first, Wardhaugh and I submitted an extensively revamped version, only to be told by the publisher that we had done too much, and that it had not budgeted for wholesale layout changes. Some of our edits never made it into the final product, strictly for commercial reasons. When working on Origins next, we essentially had to negotiate the speed at which history would change – no more than one hundred extensive edits per volume! The naked goal was to make just enough changes to justify a new edition and, the market willing, a new edition after that.

My work on Origins and Destinies likely did raise my profile in the Canadian history community – but perhaps not in a positive way. I’d forgotten, until Twitter reminded me, that many historians have a deep-seated antipathy to textbooks. Maybe it’s the singular and single-minded narrative. Maybe it’s the cost to students. Maybe it’s that entire literatures are routinely squeezed into a few paragraphs or lines, or bypassed altogether. Maybe it’s that the authors are, necessarily, so often writing beyond their direct expertise. Maybe it’s the longstanding dominance of middle-aged white guys in the market. Maybe it’s the speedboat.

So with Google and Wikipedia having eaten away at textbooks’ utility this century, with professors less accepting of single-narrative interpretations of the past (and less expecting that students will actually read one thousand pages of assigned text), and with students less willing to purchase textbooks (and with scores of places to score them online), the end of Origins and Destinies is a symptom of the history survey textbook’s demise– to which many historians will say good riddance. I can sympathize with that point of view.

Yet my sense is that while historians routinely disparage survey textbooks, we also lean heavily on them, because what makes a textbook suspect also makes it indispensable: it offers a single-narrative  interpretation of the past. This is useful in our own writing – although we avoid citing textbooks, because of the stigma – but it is particularly useful in our teaching. A textbook offers a foundation on which to build. But that does not mean we adopt it slavishly. In fact, we treat its real and perceived flaws as a feature, not a bug. The textbook’s existence means that we can deconstruct and re-present moments in the history it tells – and do so to a degree we couldn’t if we had to construct all that history from scratch.

So as much as we malign textbooks, my guess is that Canadian historians still keep one close to hand when preparing a class. Increasingly, it is likely to be John Douglas Belshaw’s open-access two-volume Pre-Confederation and Post-Confederation Canadian History, which, so far as I know, are the only new university-level Canadian history textbooks produced this century.[6] Belshaw’s books are online, free, keyword-searchable, and – worth mentioning – really good. I just wish there were more like them. But with the single-narrative history textbook in decline, and knowing how much time, money, and effort has to be invested in making one, I doubt that there will be. Canadian history will become more atomized, and we will have to do more of the work ourselves in making sense of it. Oh well, at least we’ll have AI to help us.

Alan MacEachern teaches History at Western University.


[1] I’m being facetious, of course. When Nelson was batting around the idea of ninth editions, Wardhaugh and I told the publisher that it was time for the texts to be completely blown up and rewritten by scholars who did not look like us. Nelson was so won over by our anti-pitch that they invited us to stay 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 player Sidney Crosby in the seventh edition of Destinies as “Sydney Crosbie.” It felt like a cry for help. Destinies, 7th ed., 584.

[4] Destinies, 8th ed., 549 and 589.

[5] Destinies, 7th ed., 33; and Destinies, 8th ed., 33. This decision was not taken lightly, knowing that the textbooks’ original authors may well have vehemently opposed such wording.

[6] Thomas Peace and Sean Kheraj’s Open History Seminar: Canadian History is a collection of primary-source documents followed by interpretations by historians.

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2 thoughts on “Confessions of a Textbook Author

  1. Lee

    I think there has been the acceptance that a single perspective on an historic event is acceptable in teaching and generally. I think historical events should be viewed and taught from different perspectives… such as newspaper reports of the day, government reports , indigenous oral and including the context of the times. This would help students with their critical thinking. However today so much of the context is missing from so much of the discussions about the past… educators and writers need to be transparent about the current practice of presentism… judging the past from our present day lofty moral position. There is much to improve on all aspects of education and writing about history.

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