The Council endorses textbooks that embody vivid narrative style, stress significant people and events, and promote better understanding of all cultures, including our own, on the principle that improved textbooks will advance the curriculum, stimulate student learning, and encourage educational achievement for children of all backgrounds.

The Council was founded on the following premises. Textbooks are powerful instruments of teaching and learning. They constitute the de facto curriculum in most schools. Yet textbook selection at the district and school level is often a casual and haphazard affair. Political considerations too often intrude on content. To remedy this condition, the American Textbook Council acts as a clearinghouse of information about educational publishing and social studies textbooks. Consulted by educators and policymakers at all levels, it provides detailed information and textbook reviews for individuals and groups interested in improving history materials.

The Council's studies across the curriculum demonstrate which history textbooks are satisfactory and which are inadequate, and they give detailed reasons why. In 1994, the Council published the acclaimed paperback book, History Textbooks: A Standard and Guide. The Council's 1995 report Religion in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us stimulated discussion of the subject in Congress and across the nation. In 1998, the Council published a guide for textbook publishers and school boards entitled Learning about Religion, Learning from Religion, and the report, A New Generation of History Textbooks. In May 2000, the Council published History Textbooks at the New Century, an evaluation of the nation's most widely adopted American history and world history textbooks. Last year, the Council published the widely discussed report, Islam and the Textbooks. It has recently completed World History Textbooks: A Review.

The Council is a non-partisan research organization interested in textbook improvement and the evaluation and analysis of instructional materials. But during the last decade it has not shrunk from landmark curriculum controversies in California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and other states. The Council has figured prominently in national debates about curriculum, multiculturalism, national history standards, world history, the history of religion, women's history, textbook accuracy, and moral education. Its work has been featured in many recent books on contemporary education and culture. But most important, each year, working with hundreds of educators on a one-to-one basis, the Council helps schools make better decisions about the social studies textbooks they use.

The Council is the operating arm of the Center for Education Studies, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational organization chartered in the state of New York to review textbooks and to develop of instructional materials in history and civic education. The Council is not a trade association or commercial enterprise. The Council does not represent textbook publishers or editors.

American Textbook Council director Gilbert T. Sewall was a history instructor at Phillips Academy and an education editor at Newsweek. He has been on the faculties of New York University and Boston University. He is the author of Necessary Lessons: Decline and Renewal in American Schools and the co-author of After Hiroshima: The U.S.A. since 1945. In addition, Sewall is the editor of The Eighties: A Reader. His articles on education and other subjects have appeared in Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Society, and many other publications. Assistant director Stapley W. Emberling is a former legal associate at Sotheby's and editor at This World.