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[January 10th, 2007] President George W. Bush just may be the most interested reader of U.S. history today—or at least of U.S. history textbooks, including those now under consideration by the Portland Public Schools.

Don't laugh. Last month, Bush rebuffed criticism of his presidency by noting that the jury was still out on that other George (Washington, of course). If historians still can't agree on their assessment of "No. 1," Bush said in a White House press conference about Iraq, how could anyone fairly judge him, "No. 43"?

The scary thing is, he's right. Publishers are constantly rewriting the textbooks on U.S. history to correct injustices but also to reflect the latest trends in educational styles and the demands of their customers, says historian Kyle Ward, whose 2006 book, History in the Making, chronicles those trends.

Portland school administrators are now reviewing new textbooks for the district's U.S. history courses as part of a larger review of new options for a whole host of other courses. The impending changes have created opposition from many Portland teachers worried about losing the freedom they now enjoy to craft their own courses.

Amid the controversy, WW checked out some of the history textbooks under consideration to see just how well the school district could be preparing its students for Jeopardy!, er, full citizenship! Using all three sides of the golden triangle of historical inquiry, we looked at our sampling through the prisms of race, class and gender. Here's what we found:

TEXTBOOK: American Anthem (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

RACE: American Anthem looks like USA Today, with its full menu of sidebars, pull quotes and graphics. It is also remarkably current, running all the way up to an account of Hurricane Katrina. That said, the textbook never mentions the racial inequalities brought glaringly to light as a result of the natural disasters striking the Gulf Coast in 2005, and instead uses the calamity to note that "the spirit of the American people has remained always steady." Hallelujah!

Further back in history, however, racial inequality is explored at length. Martin Luther King Jr. receives 23 mentions, 10 more than George Washington. CÉsar ChÁvez fills three pages, but Sacajawea gets short shrift, making the grade only as an "invaluable guide" who is "acquired" mysteriously by Lewis and Clark. The authors do write that Sacajawea's name means "canoe launcher," though. Ooh, how exotic!

CLASS: Discussions of class distinctions in the United States take on a decidedly objective tone. In that sense, every "on the one hand" has another "on the other hand" attached. For example, John D. Rockefeller "gave away huge amounts of his wealth to colleges and other good causes." On the other hand, "there were huge inequalities under capitalism"—to Rockefeller's benefit, of course.

Unions of the 1880s sound moderately heroic. Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president who led striking workers during the epoch of the robber barons, was "disappeared" South American-style from textbooks at the height of America's Red Scare in the 1950s, Ward says. But Debs appears numerous times in the latest offering from Holt. By comparison, the striking air-traffic controllers of the 1980s sound like pests. "As federal employees, the 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' organization were forbidden to strike," the text notes. "Reagan warned them—and then he fired them all. Despite the resulting confusion at airports, the public generally approved of the president's uncompromising actions."

GENDER: The Pill and birth control seem like they might be worth a line in this 2-inch-thick tome. But American Anthem, which includes a Spanish-language index, never mentions the Pill's approval by federal regulators in the 1960s or any other form of birth control. No me digas!

The pivotal event in American women's history—the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that women and men were equal—gets four separate mentions.

TEXTBOOK: The American Journey (Prentice Hall)

RACE: A Native American graces the cover. But the hefty text deals with Native American history only insomuch as it crosses white settlers' paths. Not even the brave Sacajawea earns a shout-out.

Notably, George Washington beats out Martin Luther King Jr., 21 mentions to five. And Harriet Tubman is noticeably absent. But the book corrects a longstanding myth that Rosa Parks acted entirely out of fatigue when she refused to give up her bus seat, setting straight a key chain of events in history that might otherwise seem accidental.

CLASS: We can't completely trust a book that mistakenly credits Merle Travis with writing the country-music classic "Okie from Muskogee," when the ode to working-class heroes was actually written by Merle Haggard.

Despite this slip-up, American Journey doesn't give Ronald Reagan quite the pass that American Anthem did when writing about the 40th president's anti-union stance. "The flip side of the economic boom [of the 1980s] was another round in the Republican offensive against labor unions," write the authors of American Journey. "Reagan set the tone when he fired more than eleven thousand members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization for violating a non-strike clause in their hiring agreement. He claimed to be enforcing the letter of the law, but the message to organized labor was clear."

GENDER: American Journey tackles the subject of birth-control pills, noting its importance in transforming America's sexual behaviors and attitudes. The Seneca Falls Convention, however, is summed up in less than a page. Equal but not equally deserving of ink, apparently.

TEXTBOOK: American History: A Survey (McGraw-Hill)

RACE: The late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948, is described only as a supporter of states' rights. No mention that Thurmond ran as a segregationist, or that the South Carolinian set a record for filibustering when he argued against the Civil Rights Act in 1957 (nor, for that matter, that he fathered a child with a black housekeeper when he was 22, or that he painted on his own hair with eyeliner).

Pocahontas makes an appearance as the wife of a white colonist who returns to England "as a Christian convert and a gracious woman, [who] stirred interest in projects to 'civilize' the Indians." The passage glosses over Pocahontas' kidnapping, and though it places the word "civilize" in quotation marks, it hardly raises questions about the practice.

CLASS: Fairly substantial discussions of the Iraq War turn up here, and while it's not exactly an issue of class, it's worth noting that the book declares George Bush lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction: the false pretext that has resulted in so many Americans from working-class backgrounds getting blown up in Iraq.

Like American Anthem, though, this text leaps from a discussion of Iraq to make the class-obliterating statement that "Americans are not only burdened by difficult challenges but are also armed with the extraordinary energy and resilience that has allowed the nation—through its long and often turbulent history—to endure, to flourish, and continually to imagine and strive for a better future." Two hundred and thirty-one years never seemed so glorious!

GENDER: The textbook contains a sidebar essay called "Where Historians Disagree: Women's History," which lays out a debate for both "making room" for female figures in the official history books and recasting history in a way that incorporates the everyday lives of women—before they were filling such roles as U.S. Speaker of the House.

"Gender is an essential part of understanding women's (and men's) lives," the authors write, "even if it is not the only, or even always, the most important part."

Indeed. A recent study by Kay Chick, an education expert at Penn State Altoona, found that men still outnumber women in U.S. history textbooks by as much as six to one.