19th-Century Ame­rican Schoolbooks as Primary Sources in Cultural Studies: Their Production and Use

Abstract

The article focuses on the 19th-century American history schoolbooks as primary sour­ces in historiography and cultural studies. The re­levance of the topic is determined by the fact that historically several regions with different econo­mic, cultu­ral and ideological characteristics existed and deve­loped in the USA. Therefore, broad political powers of the state governments that traditionally made laws in the field of education may give us the reason to assume that the narration of the American history in books produced and used in different parts of the country might have reflected values and beliefs of those particular states.The study was based on the principle of historicism, which let us closely analyze such questions as the authorship, places of schoolbook publishing and areas of their distribution with re­ference to the changing sociocultural realia of the 19th-century America.The following conclusions were drawn. The advent and development of public education as well as the blossom of the printing industry in New England contributed to the fact that in the 1820s there emerged a big group of authors who wrote the most popular American histories. Simultaneously with the growth of the number and influence of publi­shing firms in New York and Philadelphia, the center of the textbook production moved to the Mid-Atlantic Region in the latter half of the century.The United States territorial acquisitions of the 19th century predetermined the mass migration of the American citizens who amongst other possessions carried their children’s textbooks to new places. Due to the fact that the system of public edu­cation was still in its juvenile years and did not enjoy authority among the citizens, school administrations and teachers were not able to make parents buy new schoolbooks from the lists approved by schools, counties, or states, which led to the problem of textbook diversity and to the distribution of the northern books throughout the whole country. Concurrently, high profits in textbook business attracted many people who tried to write and sell as many histories as possible. This resulted in the problem of oversupply of schoolbooks.