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Teacher
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Editors' note: This feature is meant to provide practical, although not
unbiased, reviews of textbooks based on experience in the classroom. Readers
will note that the teachers who wrote these reviews differ widely in terms
of what they seek in a textbook. Moreover, these reviews are not meant to
advocate or discourage the adoption of any one text. Rather, they seek to
begin a dialogue about textbook use that we hope will continue long past
the posting of this issue. Indeed, we would like to encourage other teachers—both
at the secondary and at the university-level—to send us comparable
reviews of texts for inclusion in later issues of World History Connected. |
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Howard
Spodek, The World's History, 3rd edition (Prentice Hall-Pearson,
2005). |
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The Spodek text is the one I have used with my section
of the 9th-grade history course required at Saint
Ann's School, "19th- and 20th-Century World History." It has several
important advantages for this purpose, I think, and one disadvantage.
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First, it is the only text I know of that is not
written by a committee. The fact that it has been written by Howard Spodek
et non al. has the effect on page after page of brightening the narrative
and giving it a point of view which my best students can discern and criticize
and which all my students find congenial enough to put some pleasure into
reading it. |
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Second, it comes with interpolated documents; but
the documents are chosen for their vividness. They are never very long,
and often they are poems, like William Blake's "London"
with its brief but unforgettable vision of an industrializing England. Ninth-graders, who
at 14 are usually new to adult passions and commitments, and just as new
to the history of such things, are not deprived of the power of good writing
when they begin what we hope will be a long career in reading and assessing
the written artifacts of past lives.
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Third, Spodek's text comes with some of the best
ancillae. The study website by David Trask is not a star, but then, none
of the study websites for published World History textbooks are stars. They
are all adequate and helpful (once you can get in past their firewalls)
and not (so far as I can tell) misleading. But the readings books for Spodek:
The Global Experience: Readings in World History (one volume for
each of the two volumes of text), and the two Document Sets, are excellent.
New teachers of World History will find that googling the web (as of this
writing) still does not yield English translations of some of the most telling
written artifacts of non-Western cultures. They will find the Spodek readings
books particularly useful. Many of their students will also find the published
book of Spodek's own History Notes useful. |
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The single disadvantage of Spodek, from this teacher's
point of view, is that when the textbook gets to the last fifty years, years
which are all-important to teenagers anywhere, it discusses them continent
by continent and culture by culture. This treatment has the virtue of deemphasizing
what I like to call occidentalism, but the trouble with it is that the unifying
themes for this period,Cold War, Decolonization, Consumerism, Globalization,are
all pretty hard to focus through any cultural region other than the West.
For a teacher this means deconstructing and repackaging the textbook presentation,going
out on your own,which is easy and even exhilirating for a seasoned World
Historian, but a little intimidating for a novice. I like to compare and
contrast Algeria and India for this period, but any teacher can find a similar
posthole with material in Spodek's chapters. This is a good textbook. |
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William
Everdell
St. Ann's School
Brooklyn, N.Y.
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