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In today's eighth-grade American histories literary quality and episodic description take a plunge. These stand in contrast to John Garraty's excellent The Story of America, introduced in California in 1991 and now out of print. California has now adopted the text-light, picture-captioned eighth-grade textbook, American Nation, from Prentice Hall, full of boxes and white space, a book that commands a huge share of the market nationwide.
In 2005 California adopted virtually every book that came to the table, including some shockingly dumbed down and biased volumes. Now the books are established in classrooms.