There is an on-going kerfuffle over the depiction of slavery in a textbook published by McGraw-Hill and used in Texas high school classrooms, in which slaves are depicted as “workers” whose lives weren’t so bad. An interesting point about how textbooks are written was recently made in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. The article is linked up below, but the larger point about why grammar matters to how we talk about the tough topics in history is one well worth considering for both students and teachers.