Prejudice can be defined as a negative attitude towards others based on prejudgment. The Almanac volumes of this series starts with a timeline which, rather curiously, begins at 632 ce – “conflict erupts among Muslims … leading to a major split between Sunni and Shiite”. Biologically speaking, prejudice probably predates humanity. The attitude of the Aryan barbarian invaders of India toward the “black‐faced dasyus … with flat noses and … unintelligible speech … who do not worship the gods” of the high Harrapan civilization they overthrew (quotations from the Rig‐Veda) is not very different from the attitude of one tribe of chimpanzees to another. Even the word “barbarian” comes from the Greek distinction between people who can speak properly and sub‐humans who just make “ba‐ba‐ba” noises. Curiously, the Romans did not share these common prejudices. In all the long series of bitter and bloody Roman civil wars there is no real indication that either race or religious prejudice played any serious part. They just fought about power.
There is no scientific basis at all for this. Galton and his successors started modern genetic research in order to look into the differences between human beings, but paradoxically, modern genetic research has shown that all humans are very similar – much more closely related to each other than different groups of chimpanzees are. I occasionally console myself with the thought that humans are slightly better than chimps. If chimpanzees had invented nuclear weapons we would all be dead by now, whereas the human race still seems to have a very slight opportunity to get its act together. In order to survive, however, humans are going to have to get rid of a lot of their existing prejudices. Muslims are going to have to take notice of the bits of the Koran that say they should tolerate and respect other people of the book, Jews (and Australian aborigines) are going to have to get over the fact that some god or other spoke to them out of a flaming bush (or in a dream world) and promised them some bit of land for themselves and no‐one else, and even, as an extreme case, some in Ireland are going to have to accept that the prentice boys of Londonderry (or Derry) were just as heroic as the defenders of Limerick 300 years ago, and anyway it no longer matters.
One of the most important groups to impress this on is that of young white Americans. They are a difficult group to reach because their culture is so dominant that they do not need to consider others. The most militant and uneducated Taliban recruit is likely to have a broader interest in American youth culture than many American youths will have in Islam. Any book which sets out to explain the nature of prejudice to young Americans is therefore well worthy of consideration. This book comes in four solid volumes. Two, called for some reason The Almanac, discuss, in the first volume, the nature and causes of prejudice, and in the second, a dozen case studies – of Rwanda, the internment of Japanese‐Americans in 1942, prejudice in Iraq: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the Arab‐Israeli conflict, etc. The volume on biographies contains accounts of the lives of 25 curiously assorted individuals. The usual great and good – Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Mother Theresa, etc, interspersed with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Himmler, Helen Keller, Wilma Mankiller (first female Cherokee chief), Smuts and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The volume of Primary Sources consists of substantial editorial introductions to short extracts from American newspapers and magazines, with suggestions for class discussions, etc. All entries have brief sensible recommendations for further reading, covering generally available books and free websites.
The considerable size of this series is mainly due to the fact that each entry is designed to be used as a teaching aid in its own right, without the need for cross‐referring. Every term that might be even slightly confusing for an American adolescent is explained every time it is used. I tried counting the number of times the words Islam or Muslim received one‐sentence explanations, but lost track after the first dozen or so. This incessant repetition makes the book rather cumbersome if you try to read straight through it. The book panders to the prejudices of its target audience by concentrating largely on America. Thus for example, in the Biographies a chapter is devoted to Alice Paul, a founder of the American women's suffrage movement, noting that while living in England she was inspired by Emmeline Pankhurst (misspelled as “Parkhurst” throughout the book, including the index) and mentioning her imprisonment in Holloway Gaol (misspelled as Halloway and not indexed), rather than using the Pankhursts as the key example.
In spite of minor errors and imbalances, this book seems to me to be well designed for its purpose. All librarians of American high schools and colleges should seriously consider it. School and college librarians in other countries should also consider buying it, if extracts fit into a clear teaching programme. Public reference libraries may also find it useful as a source of social and political information, as long as they are clear that it was designed as an educational aid rather than as a general reference book.
