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.
当前教材中的插图不再是人为编造的或是年代混乱的图片，而是选自各色杂志中用于讨论的漫画、照片和图像。比如，殖民地时期的章节中有雕刻的船首、自由钟、科普利的画作——整整一个早期美国文物画廊。19世纪时期的插画都选用了19世纪的漫画和照片，而且是具有髙度艺术水平的摄影作品，而用于20世纪历史章节中的装饰插图足可以开一个现代艺术博物馆。
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，使用这些髙质量、髙艺术水平的设计却颇具讽刺效果。关于19世纪童工和贫民区住宅的照片拍得如此美丽，使人们甚至忽略了照片的主旨。看着这些照片或是维克多·加托所作的纽约三角内衣工厂火灾画，人们看到的不是社会的惨剧或丑陋，而是一件件艺术品。现代史的章节中，图片风格与文章内容的冲突同样巨大：垃圾场和污水河的彩照简直像《美食家》杂志中的美食图片般迷人。有一本书竟采用了本·沙恩绘制的一幅美丽的比基尼岛核弹爆炸图来说明核试验的恐怖，还为地球潜在的生态环境危机配了一幅地球旋转、白云飞扬的彩色照片。这本书也许是对现代社会问题描述最失败的作品了。如果说50年代的教材过于幼稚，因为它们过于简单和粗糙，那么现在的教材也同样幼稚，因为它们在诸多方面有悖常情。美国历史不再是枯燥无趣的史实，而成了能带来感官享受的经历。
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.
成人对历史教材的修改感到惊讶，多半是因为他们心里还残存一丝希望，那就是在书本之外的世界上尚存在客观事实。怀有这种希望的人当然是愚蠢的。所有20世纪出生的孩子们都知道，或者说都应该知道，人类社会中没有绝对之物，因此也不会有所谓的绝对客观。我们都知道，从一定程度上而言，每一个历史学家都重新创造一个世界，所有的历史都是当代人撰写的历史。