They were old, but i don’t think they were 50 years old. I think they agreed with the theory that
So i think WWII would have been intentionally considered too recent even if we’d had new books.
We only had rebound books in English class, i think. Some of them had been rebound so many times that they were missing the last page of the story, and we had to pass around our books so everyone could read it.
Our science books were up to date, and supplemented with other materials in the AP classes.
But if you hold the theory that “history” can’t be too recent, you may not feel the need to update your history texts all that often.