A Mirror to New England: The Compendious History of Jedidiah Morse and Elijah Parish

Abstract

PART of the process by which each generation reinterprets the past for its own purposes is the revision of history textbooks. Inasmuch as those volumes reflect contemporary attitudes, they provide documentary evidence for a later generation of interpreters. Surely the last several decades illustrate how texts dealing with minorities, war and peace, radical movements, and the poor have been revised and enlarged under the influence of public issues. Just as surely, such textual changes testify to underlying alterations in the country's social fabric. Whatever else, they demonstrate how American historians, conscious of complex, deeply rooted social problems, strove to make others aware of those ills so that they might be remedied, all the while shaping their work to the demands of the market place in a nicely balanced marriage of relevance and commercialism. Indeed, that fact of American life may be one of the more important lessons today's texts will teach the authors of another era.