Professor: Approved Virginia History Textbook Still Has Errors

Professor: Approved Va. History Textbook Still Has Errors

WASHINGTON -- Although "Our Virginia: Past and Present," the controversial history textbook that claimed that "[t]housands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson," was revised after that claim was challenged and other inaccuracies were identified, the updated version, which has been approved by the commonwealth's Board of Education, still has errors.

As the Virginian-Pilot reports, one college professor who reviewed the revised edition this summer, George Mason University's Zachary Schrag, noticed "dubious quotations, misleading images and maps depicting inaccurate borders. His list of errors -- including a reference to the "United States Navel Academy" -- fills nearly four pages."

Following the initial controversy, Virginia education officials mandated new rules for publishers, including certifying that textbooks have been reviewed for accuracy by academic experts.

Joy Masoff, the author of "Our Virginia," isn't a historian and admitted to finding some of the information on the website of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, a group that has claimed that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War. Masoff's lack of expertise was highly criticized following the initial controversy.

Yoni Applebaum, blogging at the The Atlantic, wrote at the time: "It's worth noting that Masoff has built something of a career for herself by collecting thinly-sourced, counterintuitive factoids, and packaging them into such weighty tomes as 'Oh, Yikes! History's Grossest, Wackiest Moments.' It's tough to understand, really, how that sort of tabloid sensibility could possibly have proven problematic when applied to textbooks."

WATCH: Virginia Schools Using Inaccurate History Textbooks

CLARIFICATION: The excerpted passage from the blog of The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates was written by a guestblogger, Yoni Applebaum, and not Coates himself. This post has been updated.

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