History in the Textbook

Today in History class, we were asked to go through two history text books and get the author, title, publishing date, the organizing strategy, the shortest period of time per chapter, the longest period of time per chapter, and the amount each area of the world gets in the book. When we were first given this assignment, I will be honest, I did not quite understand the meaning of it. I was thinking, how does this relate to actual history? Well, it actually does say a lot about history and what people find important. After all the data I collected, something I realized was that in both of the text books, the amount of years that were covered per chapter became less and less in chronological order. This means that we either know a lot less about things that happened a long time ago or we find that information not important. When I think about it, we definentely know a lot less about things that happened a long time ago, but also, I don't think that people would find that information as relevant today. But I think that the things that happened a long time ago are the most important, especially in this class, because I am looking for themes in world history. In the second book, the chapter that covered the least amount of time was 31 years before, during and after World War 2. The chapter that covered the most amount of time was 3500 B.C.E. to 1500 B.C.E. I also found that Europe and Asia got the most amount of pages in the book. Obviously, one would think that America would get the least because it wasn't discovered until Europe and Asia were already well developed. But since the more resent years were covered the most, I was suprised to see that America wasn't covered as much as all the rest of the continents. All in all, I wasn't too surprised with the outcome of the data collected from the History text books.