Like many history teachers, Brent Ruswick struggles for ways to lessen his dependence on textbooks while also teaching students to read their textbook with the critical eye of a historian. It is a struggle he has come to appreciate more keenly as, in addition to teaching the standard college-level introductory history courses, he also teaches the teaching methods course that serves as the capstone for his university's social studies education program. This article describes an assignment that the author recently tried out in an introductory American history course. The assignment provides an opportunity to link principles of culturally relevant teaching and critical reading to the course's core historical themes, while allowing his methods course and American history course to, in some sense, "speak" to each other. The author sought to design an assignment that would compel students to categorize and analyze the historical figures, places, and events that make their way into textbooks, in a manner that would align with the course-long essential questions. This textbook analysis assignment ideally would get students to explore the issues of representation and power suggested by the author's essential questions while modeling several pedagogical principles skills that, though often not made transparent for students in a college history course, might plant seeds in these future teachers' minds about how to approach their own elementary-grade history course some day.