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But beyond this knowledge there is still a hope for some reliable authority, for some fixed stars in the universe. We may know that journalists cannot be wholly unbiased and that "balance" is an imaginary point between two extremes, and yet we hope that Walter Cronkite will tell us the truth of things. In the same way, we hope that our history will not change—that we learned the truth of things as children. The texts, with their impersonal voices, encourage this hope, and therefore it is particularly disturbing to see how they change, and how fast.
但是在此認知之上，我們仍然希望讀到的歷史中能有一些可信度、一點權威性，就像我們希望星空中會有一些星星能恒久不變。我們都清楚記者無法做到完全的客觀公正，所謂的“平衡”也只是位于兩極之間的一個想象中的點，但我們仍然希望沃爾特·克朗凱特能夠告訴我們事情的真相。同樣，我們希望美國的歷史是確定不變的，希望我們在孩提時學到的都是真實的。這種希望在教科書客觀中立的口吻中得到鼓勵，因此，我們尤其無法忍受看到教科書發生變化，而且變化如此之快。
Slippery history! Not every generation but every few years the content of American-history books for children changes appreciably. Schoolbooks are not, like trade books, written and left to their fate. To stay in step with the cycles of "adoption" in school districts across the country, the publishers revise most of their old texts or substitute new ones every three or four years. In the process of revision, they not only bring history up to date but make changes—often substantial changes—in the body of the work. History books for children are thus more contemporary than any other form of history. How should it be otherwise? Should students read histories written ten, fifteen, thirty years ago? In history, the system is reasonable—except that each generation of children reads only one generation of schoolbooks. The transient history is those children's history forever—their particular version of America.
多變的歷史！不只是每隔一代人，而是每隔幾年，孩子們的美國歷史教科書的內容便會發生重大的變化。和大眾讀物不同，教科書不會寫出來然后任其自生自滅。為了迎合全國各學區選用教材的周期，出版商們每隔三四年便要大規模修訂一次教科書或者直接以新書取而代之。修訂過程中，他們不僅更新最近的歷史，而且會對書本主體進行修改——大幅修改。因而孩子們所用的歷史教科書比其他任何形式記錄的歷史都要更具當代特色。不然又當如何呢？難道讓孩子們去讀十年、十五年，甚至三十年前所寫的歷史教科書？就歷史而言，整個體系是合理的，但卻沒有考慮到每一代美國孩子只能讀到一套教材，而這個短暫存在的版本就成為孩子們永恒不變的歷史，決定了他們如何理解自己的國家。
