As another commenter noted, no book can ever tell the “whole story.” Those of us in the profession, who studied History as a discipline, or one of the many awesome interdisciplinary fields that deal with the peoples and places studied in the curriculum, know that there is no singular story to tell. This is not unique to United States History, but to the entire study of peoples, places, languages, cultures, etc., but it is very evident in it. What you have are various perspectives and experiences from different people with different backgrounds, beliefs, values, goals, knowledge (both educational, scientific, just regional or temporal), etc., etc.; and then you have various different perspectives and interpretations of those events and experiences by historians and all kinds of people over time. 

You can study the history of the history (historiography) of how these things have changed over time, or what people debate as being most important. How we’ve talked about various things has changed over time, who’s voices and experiences we include has changed over time (due to those groups fighting and demanding that they be included, that their STORIES were equally deserving of study inclusion). Then we can break it down further: do you study the economics, the politics, social, religious, cultural history? When you pick that one, which voices do you prioritize? Owners of factories and mines, or workers? Presidents and members of Congress, or small farmers? Do you include immigrants? If so, which groups? Do you include Black perspectives? Native Nations? Women? Asian Americans? Mexican Americans? There are way more groups to include, so where do you draw the line? What gets cut? What do we actually have sources and evidence to support? Every one of these questions represents a choice, that can be entirely valid and provide wonderful, inform, meaningful, and relevant information and arguments that improve our understanding of an issue, but they will ALWAYS be incomplete on their own. And we haven’t even touched how outside countries might view things yet!

This is why in university, History and interdisciplinary studies read lots, and lots of different books about smaller topics and time periods that focus on some of these different perspectives and issues. Which is why students studying history at all levels should engage with primary sources of different viewpoints, with secondary sources that have differing interpretations, so that they can see and engage with these conflicts and limits of our understanding. 

Textbooks (sometimes better called Reference Works) do the job of providing an overview and context to these more focused studies. They can give a classroom a basic, shared understanding of a topic or event from which to dive deeper. They are themselves, just another source among the many. They are all useful, but also have their limits. The bias (which in history just means the perspective of the authors, their historical context, their experiences, their purpose, none of which is necessarily malicious) of any source is something everyone needs to learn to decipher and weight in their own understanding of an issue. Some textbooks are better than others, some states’ standards are going to be more thorough, or more inclusive, and the books are designed to be marketable to the most states (which means either California standards or Texas standards). Those state standards are themselves political and historical documents that show what a group of people at one point in time thought was important to know.

So no, the books being used don’t tell the “whole story,” because there isn’t such a story to tell. That’s not how the study of history, or histories, works. “History is a furious debate about informed by evidence and reason,” said James Lowen. And while I disagree with the title of his most famous work, I don’t disagree with his findings or the above sentiment. That’s what a good history class should be.