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It’s a rivalry that feels at once inevitable and arbitrary, timeless and very rooted in our hyperpartisan era: California versus Texas.

Over the weekend, my colleague Dana Goldstein published an in-depth analysis of American history textbooks used in California and Texas schools. Though they came from the same publishers, they’re different in ways that are informed by politics.

On Monday, I talked with Dana about the project, why she picked California and Texas, and what she’ll be watching going forward. Here’s our conversation:

Can you briefly tell me a bit more about how the project came about?

I got the idea for this story at the very beginning of 2019, when I did a previous story, which was about the state of Michigan and how it had a huge battle between conservatives and liberals about how to define what should be taught in social studies classrooms.

And while I was doing that piece, I visited some schools and I went into a history classroom and I saw this teacher had a textbook and it was completely marked up, like she had stuck sticky tags all over it, and underlined and highlighted stuff. And I thought, “The textbook is still important.”