I am one of many former AP Euro students that was assigned William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire when I was in high school, and my journey with that book might be a bit amusing to those of you that probably suspect the end result: I devoured that book over the first week of summer vacation, and was disappointed there was no more work to do in connection to the book. For a few years after the class, I remembered it fondly as a rather lively (if somewhat shocking) interpretation of the middle ages.
Fast forward a few years: I'm studying my history degree, and I decide (on a whim) to look up the book because I remembered it and because now that I had an understanding of historical and scholarly review, I wanted to see how it held up in the eyes of historians who actually have a knowledge of the topic matter.
It, uh, doesn't.
This concerned me because if I could get suckered by a lively narrative that has more holes than Camp Green Lake, how many other kids were reading that book and getting the wrong impression?
So fast forward a few more years to now. I'm about to start teaching high school history this fall. 11th grade US history. (Basically covers the breadth of the continent's history from indigenous people to now) I'm ecstatic to get started, but I also don't want to give my students texts that are full of it.
What are some books that you would recommend as reliable supplemental texts in my class?
I would avoid Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
If you're not familiar with it, he attempts to explain why European civilizations conquered so many other civilizations and colonized so many other countries. He argues that Europeans had simply the right geographical advantages which enabled them to conquer. Although Diamond makes a lot of interesting observations, the problem is that he's trying to revive the theory of environmental determinism, a theory which has been pretty much dismissed by most historians and geographers. Environmental determinism is now rejected because although civilizations are certainly affected by their environments, human beings are still free agents and cultures are shaped by many other factors. It's too easy to find lots of cases which don't fit well into Diamond's theory. For example, in the 1400s the Chinese civilization was powerful enough and had all the right advantages so that they could have conquered much of the world, yet they simply chose not to.
As for reliable supplemental history texts, I do have my favorites, but I can't think of any that would be appropriate for 11th graders.
The more popular Lies My Teacher Told Me has problems (which, IIRC, /u/CommodoreCoCo laid out really nicely in a thread awhile back). But James Loewen's "companion" book, Lies Across America, I think would work really well for a high school class. It's short sections about National Historic Sites and Historic Markers in the U.S. that are really, really wrong. Some of them are omissions from the plaque or museum (see also: plantations); some of them are flat out WRONG (see also: "Indian attacks" on wagon trains on the Overlander trails. Not so much).
You pick up some history, you learn a little bit about how to approach public history critically, and the book is pretty friendly to cherry-picking relevant things.
I think a more "daily life" kind of book would also be really helpful, since that's what you don't usually get in textbooks. But I'll have to see if I can think of something that would have appealed to me in high school, versus now, LOL! There's the Greenwood Press "Daily Life in [x]" series, but those can be pretty dry.
On the positive side: my wife (a high school history teacher) has had great success using excerpts from Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 when teaching about the Americas. Aside from being a good writer and generally writing things that are defensible, Mann also does a great job of explaining where the historical claims come from (e.g., discussing the work of experts, research, contentious debates, etc.), which is a lot better than the popular books that sort of present the outcome as just something that is "known." It gives a nice sense of how this kind of research takes place, where the disagreements are, etc. It also makes for a nice comparison with some of the more mealy-mouthed textbooks out there... Mann has an amazing section in 1493 on the Spanish treatment of natives for silver mining, and it made for a nice exercise to compare it with their textbook, which said the main problem was that the Spanish did not redistribute the earnings fairly (as opposed to, say, exposing them to so much mercury that it collected in pools in their grave sites).