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Instead of made-up paintings or anachronistic sketches, there are cartoons, photographs, and paintings drawn from the periods being treated. The chapters on the Colonial period will show, for instance, a ship's carved prow, a Revere bowl, a Copley painting_a whole gallery of Early Americana. The 19th century is illustrated with 19th-century cartoons and photographs—and the photographs are all of high artistic quality. As for the 20th-century chapters, they are adorned with the contents of a modern-art museum.
當前教材中的插圖不再是人為編造的或是年代混亂的圖片，而是選自各色雜志中用于討論的漫畫、照片和圖像。比如，殖民地時期的章節中有雕刻的船首、自由鐘、科普利的畫作——整整一個早期美國文物畫廊。19世紀時期的插畫都選用了19世紀的漫畫和照片，而且是具有髙度藝術水平的攝影作品，而用于20世紀歷史章節中的裝飾插圖足可以開一個現代藝術博物館。
The use of all this art and high-quality design contains some irony. The 19th-century photographs of child laborers or urban slum apartments are so beautiful that they transcend their subjects. To look at them, or at the Victor Gatto painting of the Triangle shirtwaist-factory fire, is to see not misery or ugliness but an art object. In the modern chapters, the contrast between style and content is just as great: The color photographs of junk yards or polluted rivers look as enticing as Gourmet's photographs of food. The book that is perhaps the most stark in its description of modern problems illustrate the horrors of nuclear testing with a pretty Ben Shahn picture of the Bikini explosion, and the potential for global ecological disaster with a color photograph of the planet swirling its mantle of white clouds. Whereas in the nineteen-fifties the texts were childish in the sense that they were naive and clumsy, they are now childish in the sense that they are polymorphous-perverse. American history is not dull any longer; it is a sensuous experience.
然而，使用這些髙質量、髙藝術水平的設計卻頗具諷刺效果。關于19世紀童工和貧民區住宅的照片拍得如此美麗，使人們甚至忽略了照片的主旨。看著這些照片或是維克多·加托所作的紐約三角內衣工廠火災畫，人們看到的不是社會的慘劇或丑陋，而是一件件藝術品。現代史的章節中，圖片風格與文章內容的沖突同樣巨大：垃圾場和污水河的彩照簡直像《美食家》雜志中的美食圖片般迷人。有一本書竟采用了本·沙恩繪制的一幅美麗的比基尼島核彈爆炸圖來說明核試驗的恐怖，還為地球潛在的生態環境危機配了一幅地球旋轉、白云飛揚的彩色照片。這本書也許是對現代社會問題描述最失敗的作品了。如果說50年代的教材過于幼稚，因為它們過于簡單和粗糙，那么現在的教材也同樣幼稚，因為它們在諸多方面有悖常情。美國歷史不再是枯燥無趣的史實，而成了能帶來感官享受的經歷。
The surprise that adults feel in seeing the changes in history texts must come from the lingering hope that there is somewhere out there, an objective truth. The hope is, of course, foolish. All of us children of the 20th century know, or should know, that there are no absolutes in human affairs, and thus there can be no such thing as perfect objectivity. We know that each historian in some degree creates the world anew and that all history is in some degree contemporary history.
成人對歷史教材的修改感到驚訝，多半是因為他們心里還殘存一絲希望，那就是在書本之外的世界上尚存在客觀事實。懷有這種希望的人當然是愚蠢的。所有20世紀出生的孩子們都知道，或者說都應該知道，人類社會中沒有絕對之物，因此也不會有所謂的絕對客觀。我們都知道，從一定程度上而言，每一個歷史學家都重新創造一個世界，所有的歷史都是當代人撰寫的歷史。
