Volume 45, Number 10 · June 11, 1998
The Betrayal of History
By Alexander Stille
OTHER TEXTBOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
A History of US
by Joy Hakim
Oxford University Press, 10 volumes pp., $10.95 each (paper)
Build Our Nation
Houghton Mifflin, 704 pp., $38.34
America's Story
Harcourt Brace, 718 pp., $36.96
Our United States
Silver Burdett Ginn, 656 pp., $39.00
United States: Adventures in Time and Space
Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 765 pp., $51.96
Columbia University Professor Jack Garraty was surprised to open the latest edition of the eighth-grade textbook he had written in 1982 and learn that a Spanish explorer named Bartolomeo Gomez, and not the Englishman Henry Hudson, was credited with being the first European to discover the Hudson River. Garraty, who had taught history for thirty years, had never heard of Bartolomeo Gomez. After some research, he learned that Gomez was in fact Portuguese and not Spanish and that his claim to have discovered the Hudson River was based on extremely slender evidence: he had sailed along the Atlantic Coast and made a map that described three rivers, one of which might, or might not, be the Hudson.
Review, 5832 words
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