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There is no doubt that history books in schools generally do not present an accurate picture of history.
Sometimes this is because the victor in a conflict gets to write his own history (those evil injuns attacked the settlers mercilessly, but we failed to mention that the settlers were busy stealing the indians' land.)
Sometimes it's because the victor in a conflict feels guilt about starting the conflict in the first place (the evil white southerners enslaved the Africans, but we failed to mention that 1) northern states such as Massachussets, while not holding slaves themselves, certainly helped to transport them here and 2) in many cases the Africans sold their own people to the slavers)
And sometimes it's caused by pure and simple poor research. I can't tell you how many times I've read in history textbooks about Betsy Ross making the first American flag when in fact it most likely never happened.
Textbooks are poorly researched and poorly reviewed by the districts that will purchase them. And history textbooks are especially bad since this country's education system is pathetic when it comes to teaching that subject. Teachers want to teach history as a list of dates (always hated that. Who the hell cares what precise day something happened. Far more important to know that it happened and what the effects were) and textbooks cater to it. So since no one likes to read the damn things, they're certainly not going to review them very carefully. And even if they do, they didn't learn history very well anyway back in school so they might not catch the errors in the books.
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