Dr. Roger Hardaway, professor of history at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, recently participated in a scholarly activity that few of his peers ever experience. He was asked by textbook publisher the McGraw-Hill Company to review, evaluate and suggest revisions to the U.S. history textbook that Northwestern and hundreds of other colleges in the country have used for decades.

Hardaway said "The Unfinished Nation" is used for Northwestern's freshman-level U.S. survey courses. In one form or another, the book has been around since the 1960s and is revised and updated every few years. Hard...