The Treatment of Family Issues in United States History Textbooks: General Thoughts and a Review of Several Examples

Abstract

Beginning to formulate questions for this review, I found my identification quickly shifting to the other side of the transaction, imagining myself a textbook author (which I am not). Is the challenge implicit in this review a fair one? How can we fairly demand that yet another issue, another theme, another aspect of history be covered? After several decades of teaching, I think of coverage as a goal often in tension with that of drawing students into what makes history engaging. Moreover, in teaching family history to undergraduates, I often find it difficult to get students to think about families in a contextualized, grounded manner if they do not know any standard history. Lacking that grounding, they tend to conceive of families as floating, disconnected institutions and behaviors. These doubts show the need for caution and self-consciousness about what we ask of survey textbooks. If we ask them to cover more, we may lose depth and readability. Still, there are losses in offering students no sense of the historical embeddedness of family life. Some of what we want from introductory history courses is the education of citizens. This purpose argues strongly for inclusion of material about the family because so many contemporary public controversies concern familythose about abortion, gay rights, single motherhood, and the underclass, for example. The public discourse about these issues could be much enlightened, the whole level of the debate raised, if there were more historical knowledge and fewer assumptions about a golden age in which families were homogeneous and harmonious. We also want introductory courses to invite college students to become majors in history, to show them what is attractive about the study of history. The attractions surely include the considerable widening of the subject matter of history that has taken place in the last decades, to include the personal, the demographic, the cultural. Family issues provide excellent stories for introducing students to a variety of historical approaches and fields.