An Inclusive Litany

6/22/92

A freelance editor uncovered 3,700 errors in the history textbooks used in the Texas public schools, for which the state spent $20 million. Among the errors:

  • The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1963 instead of 1863.
  • The Civil War Battle of Vicksburg took place in Tennessee rather than in Mississippi.
  • President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1944 instead of 1945.
  • Sputnik, the first Soviet space satellite, was a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
  • Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated during the presidency of Richard Nixon, not Lyndon Johnson.
  • General Douglas MacArthur led an anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s, not Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
  • The United States won the Korean War by "using the bomb."
  • George Bush was elected president in 1989.