'Compass and Chart': Millenarian Textbooks and World History Instruction in Boston, 1821-1923

Abstract

When America’s first public high school, Boston’s English High School opened in 1821, the curriculum included a class in world history, then called “General History.” Boston’s first world history textbook, Samuel Whelpley’s (1806) Compend of history from earliest times was inspired by a composite ideology that Lawrence Cremin (1980) called “civic piety,” an amalgamation of nationalism, Eurocentrism, republicanism, evangelicism, racism, and Millenarianism. This ideology organized the narrative core of Whelpley’s textbook, which traced the rise of the Protestant Church through time to the United States, where the American nation prepared for the twin Millennia of universal salvation and universal democracy. Subsequent generations of world history textbooks in Boston found new protagonists — first the Aryan race and then “the West” — but they never replaced the twin teleologies of civic piety. A century of curricular reforms to Boston’s world history never challenged the boundaries of this Millenarian narrative structure.