Peter Conolly-Smith, a history professor at Queens College, uses the textbook "The American Promise," since 1998, and now in its seventh edition. He has been using this book for twenty years, and it has accompanied him from one school to another, providing the backbone of his post-1865 survey course. The relationship he has developed with this text is complicated. He started out feeling great enthusiasm for the book, and he continues to recommend it to graduate students about to enter the classroom. However, the book also displays certain weaknesses, especially in its more recent editions. These weaknesses include what he later refers to as a "thinning" of the text, as well as an ideological shift that set in with the third edition and became more glaring with each new incarnation thereafter. These, along with changes determined by the academic textbook marketplace, are the subject of the second half of the article.