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Showerthought: I found a whole chapter missing from my old high school history book | Forgotten Footnotes - Discusd

Showerthought: I found a whole chapter missing from my old high school history book

I was cleaning out my parents' attic in Akron and found my 2005 U.S. history textbook. I flipped to the section on post-WWII labor movements, because my grandpa was a union guy, and the page numbers just jumped. There was supposed to be a part about the Taft-Hartley Act and the strikes that followed, but it was gone. I checked the index and everything. I called my old teacher, Mr. Davies, and he said yeah, the district got a new batch of books that year and a bunch of them had that chapter physically removed before they were handed out. Nobody told the teachers why, they just got a note saying 'omit pages 422-435'. It's wild to hold the proof in your hands, you know? Has anyone else found stuff like this, where the history just got quietly cut?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice2426mo ago

My cousin in Texas had a similar thing with a civics book. Whole unit on the voting rights act was just not there, but the table of contents still listed it. She said it looked like the pages were never bound in, not torn out. Makes you wonder what gets decided behind closed doors at those school board meetings.

skylercooper5mo ago

Hold on a second, that's a huge assumption to make based on a missing chapter. Publishers update edition numbers and trim content ALL the time to save money on printing costs. If a book has a "revised edition" sticker on it, you can bet the table of contents is outdated and the old chapters got cut for space. I've seen a dozen different versions of history textbooks coming out of the same warehouse, all with different page counts and chapters swapped around. Your cousin probably got a misprinted batch from the publisher's factory, not some secret plot from the school board. Those board meetings are public record, man, and trying to sneak in a page removal would get noticed faster than you think. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a book is just a bad run from the printing press.

allen.cole6mo ago

Check the binding glue, that's the real tell. In my experience, a clean factory cut looks different than pages pulled out later at a district warehouse. If the glue edge is rough or you see extra residue, someone did that by hand after the book was printed. It means the order came down locally, not from the publisher.