I vaguely recall Texas insisting on removing a reference to prostitution in the Old West from a high school textbook (like, one sentence mentioning that there were prostitutes there) because American history classes are supposed to instill a sense of pride in our country, and that's not something to be proud of.

That's just sad. Um, not that they didn't have pride in prostitution, that history classes would put facts second to propaganda.

Tangentially related, the funniest letter we got at that publisher (in our division anyway) was in reference to a misspelling of the word "public" that had a classroom of 7th graders howling with laughter. Bet you can't guess which letter was missing...

"ublic" is a pretty funny sounding word I have to admit.

And Abraham Lincoln the first Republican president? Weird.

Yeah, but that was that old, moderate, borderline LIBERAL form of Republican. And he was from Illinois. (Even if he was born in Kentucky.)

And I had the Bible in Honors English Lit sophomore year of high school

"I think it is a good thing because a lot of kids don't have that experience, and they already want to take prayer out of school as it is, and you see where our kids are ending up!"

I wonder if there has ever been an era where people think, "Kids these days, they are so much better than they used to be."

Bet you can't guess which letter was missing...

Bwah!

I grew up near a public parking lot with the same typo. (Well, technically a letter that had fallen off. It was finally replaced after I moved away to college.)

The public library where I worked had a sign out front on which they had to constantly replace the "l" since it would disappear on a regular basis.

There's an apartment complex named Essex Place where people keep putting black tape over the "Es"

In tenth grade English, which was American Literature, we read some Puritan religious writing. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is intense.

I would have understood what Steinbeck was trying to do with Grapes of Wrath so much better if I'd known a bit more about the Christian Bible when I read it. Pretty much everything I knew at that point was from Godspell, and I didn't actually understand several large parts of that, because I just didn't have the background to understand a lot of the references. (The youth theatre program that I was in performed Godspell, and almost all the kids in that group were Jewish, and most of us had the same issue with just not getting the references. It wasn't until about two years later that I realized that in "Prepare Ye the way of the Lord," that the Lord being referred to was Jesus. Also, had no idea why John the Baptist threw a handful of glitter onto each of us as we danced onto the stage. The director realized the problem and told us all to go read Matthew, but none of us had a copy of that at home, and reading it in the library would just require too much explanation to anyone walking by.)

As I've obviously said before, I have found people to be really handicapped in reading American and English literature without a familiarity with the Bible and with the phrasing of the King James Bible, which is a brilliant piece of literature. It has nothing to do with the impact of Christianity per se. (I just watched the PBS series on the Inquisition. Do not get me started.) For a couple of hundred years, the Bible was the one book that almost everyone who could read had read and was frequently the only book a family owned. The King James Bible and Shakespeare form the bedrock of English writing.

I also think trying to teach it at the public school level would either violate the separation of church and state or cause an wingnut explosion of massive proportions.

On the other hand, I've been burned before by thinking, "No, that's just too craxy."

It is impossible to overestimate the crazy. The crazy is infinite.