Slavery in United States Survey Textbooks

Abstract

I have taught the first half of the United States history survey course some fifteen times, during a teaching career that has covered almost thirty years at four different state universities. I have assigned several different textbooks in these classes, never with total satisfaction. As the number of textbooks has proliferated, it has become more difficult to assess their relative quality. Students seem to dislike them all: whichever I assign, they complain that it is boring and fact-laden, and (I suspect) they read at it only sporadically. Although tempted to dispense with a textbook altogether and to rely only on the primary documents that I also assign, I feel that students need one and that I too need one, so that I can be selective and interpretive in lecture without worrying that the students are missing important parts of the national narrative. I therefore welcomed the invitation by the editors of the Textbooks and Teaching section of the Journal of American History to examine the treatment of slavery in survey texts, as a way to inform myself better about the relative merits of a growing number of competing works, each of which is advertised by its publisher's representative as the best, most up-to-date, and most userfriendly volume available. In this essay, I sample eight widely used college-level textbooks, in all cases the most recent edition available. 1 The sample does not include every textbook or even every widely used textbook, but it represents a broad cross section of the volumes currently available to college instructors. The books vary in focus, with some stressing political narrative and others social trends. They also vary in the student level at which they are pitched, their interpretive sophistication, the number of authors (which ranges from two to six), and the price (one volume is substantially less expensive than the others).2 My goal is not to provide a precise grade for each textbook, but to see, first, how they are doing collectively in presenting a subject that historians have subjected to extensive reinterpretation, second, how they compare with each otherin coverage, approach, interpretation, and organization and,