By the book: Assessing the place of textbooks in U.S. survey courses

Journal of American History

Volumn 91, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 1405-1415

  Cohen, Daniel J ^a,b  

^a Department of History and Art History ^*  (United States)

^b GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845794946     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3660181     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser, eds., "Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion," Journal of American History, 87 (March 2001), 1409-41;
2. Sara Evans and Roy Rosenzweig, "Introduction," Journal of American History, ibid., 78 (March 1992), 1377.
3. To create the Syllabus Finder, I downloaded several hundred syllabi from the Web, broke them apart into single words, and ranked those words by frequency, thus producing a statistical word profile of the average syllabus. The Syllabus Finder scans the database of Google with that profile and plumbs other databases of educational institutions and course materials at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; thus the software accurately locates syllabi. The Syllabus Finder takes advantage of a direct connection to Google's massive index of Web pages, available to researchers and software developers under a special program and license. (For more information about this program, called the Google Web APIs service, visit 〈http://www.google.com/apis/〉 [Nov. 8, 2004].)
4. The supplementary algorithms and databases make the Syllabus Finder much more adept than Google alone is at locating courses across the Web. The software generally can identify the college or university where each course is taught and can pull out book titles and other features of individual syllabi. It can also find syllabi that are posted as Microsoft Word documents or in portable document format (PDF) in addition to regular Web pages. Simon Kornblith greatly improved the complex regular expressions, or text pattern-matching algorithms, for book titles. Center for History and New Media, Syllabus Finder 〈http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/〉 (Nov. 8, 2004).
5. The gap between community college and university instruction narrows if we look just at the numbers for spring 2004 (the most recent semester in the dataset): 7% of the courses were at four-year colleges, 41% at community or junior colleges, and 52% at universities.
6. Peter Kolchin, "Slavery in United States Survey Textbooks," Journal of American History, 84 (March 1998), 1435.
7. For more on skepticism about Web resources, see Kornblith and Lasser, eds., "Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century";
8. and David Jaffee, "'Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye': E-Supplements and the Teaching of U.S. History," Journal of American History, 89 (March 2003), 1463-82.
9. Paul Boyer, "In Search of the Fourth 'R': The Treatment of Religion in American History Textbooks and Survey Courses," History Teacher, 29 (Feb. 1996), 195-216.