United States History Textbooks Research Articles

Teaching Disability History: The Case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This article addresses the teaching of disability history, specifically concerning the historical figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Drawing upon literature from multicultural education, disability history and disability studies in education (DSE), the authors discuss historical content and teaching ideas for instruction about FDR. The authors present findings from a content analysis of six middle level and secondary United States history textbooks, noting unanimous coverage of FDR’s disability resulting from polio. These textbooks noted how he overcame his disability and strengthened his character, referenced his decision to conceal his disability, and quoted FDR directly regarding his disability. The authors follow this analysis with discussion of several middle and high school teaching ideas that might augment textbook coverage and representation about FDR. This article explores how teachers of United States history might further develop their teaching of history through the inclusion of disability history within the context of a famous historical figure.

The Progressive Era: How American History Textbooks' Visuals Represent Women

Studies of the representation of women in United States history textbooks, both in number and manner in which they appear, have found women are inequitably represented as compared to their male counterparts and are viewed through a patriarchal lens. This study analyzed a contemporary high school United States history textbook’s representation of women in the Progressive Era compared to an earlier edition textbook. Using their visual representation of women, it was found that the textbooks continued the patriarchal view of women and their roles in society. Although the number of representations of women had slightly increased over time, these additions did not promote a more contemporary view of women's role in history, except in the area of women's rights. Recommendations for future areas of research are made. Some are: monitoring of textbooks for equability, analyzing of textbooks covering U.S. history prior to 1877 for equability in inclusion of women in history, investigating what teachers are doing to compensate for the inequity, determining whether or not state standards are inclusive of women's history, and analyzing how women's history in college level textbooks represent women in history.

An analysis of causal asyndetic constructions in United States history textbooks

AbstractOver the last three decades, an increased focus on engaging K-12 students in historical thinking has highlighted the importance of providing students with direct instruction regarding how causal relationships are formed in text. Many teachers provide this instruction by focusing on explicit causal structures, neglecting implicit forms of causation such as causal asyndetic constructions. Studies of United States history textbooks have found instances of causal asyndetic construction use, similar to the implicit constructions found in studies of spoken and written discourse. This study examines two questions: (1) Do causal asyndetic constructions occur in history textbooks with similar frequency to causal conjunctions and causal material processes? and (2) How is causal asyndetic cohesion signaled in history texts? A mixed methods analysis of two middle school and two high school textbooks demonstrates that causal asyndetic constructions are used as frequently, if not more frequently, than explicit means of expressing causation; they are signaled through authors’ uses of modals, mental processes, relational processes, and verbal processes. The use of mental processes to signal causal asyndetic constructions far outnumbered other implicit signals, accounting for 58% of the total. These findings suggest that teachers need to provide students with instruction about how to identify and make meaning of causal asyndetic constructions as well as causal conjunctions and explicit processes.

An Analysis of the Treatment of Corporate Influence on Government by United States History and American Government High School Textbooks

This article reports on an investigation to explore the possibility that ideology might be expressed in the treatment of corporate influence on federal government by social studies textbooks. Two textbooks were examined in the study—United States history and American government. Corporate influence involves activities that affect election and appointment of officials and policy decisions. Textbook content was analyzed for bias on the subject. Findings reveal ideological judgments and beliefs in the texts that provide support for corporate activities and economic arrangements conducive to corporate interests. Bias renders these textbooks inadequate for developing students’ understanding of corporate influence on government.

Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War's Destructiveness in the Confederacy

Measures of War:A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War’s Destructiveness in the Confederacy Paul F. Paskoff (bio) No language can describe, nor can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the widespread destruction of homes and property. —Columbia, South Carolina, Phoenix, 1865 Of course, the desolation of Virginia, even in the regions most exposed to the ravages of the war had been overrated. —Whitelaw Reid, 1866 Speculations on the Ground The destructiveness of war is a familiar theme in the historical literature of the American Civil War. Because almost all of the significant combat and troop movements occurred within Confederate territory, the rebel states necessarily suffered most of the physical damage done by the war. Numerous contemporary accounts and some photographs of burned factories and houses, only their chimneys left standing, as well as torn-up railroad tracks [End Page 35] and destroyed rolling stock, suggest massive, extensive devastation. But, how much physical destruction did the Civil War actually inflict on the South? An obvious enough question, it has had as yet no firm, empirical answer.1 Many southerners immediately following the war and for more than a century afterward attributed the South's relative poverty during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the war's destruction of their region's infrastructure. Characterized as the "great alibi" by Robert Penn Warren, and used by others to explain away manifold distortions in southern society, such reasoning merged smoothly with a Lost Cause ideology that sought to ennoble rebellion and make a virtue out of the seemingly enduring sacrifices offered in its service.2 Incorporated into this version of events [End Page 36] were stories of depredations by Union forces, acting either in obedience to a policy of Schrecklichkeit, terror directed against civilians, or on the orders of individual commanders and junior officers. Irrespective of the impetus for the destruction, southerners reported that the devastation extended across their region and included the burning of an unspecified but presumably large number of southern cities and towns, the despoliation of southern agriculture, and the destruction of the greater part of the South's railroads. Damage on anything approaching that magnitude could conceivably have retarded the region's economic growth and development to the extent described in the Lost Cause/Great Alibi account of the war and its aftermath. Historians, even those who reject that interpretation of post–Civil War southern history, generally agree that the war inflicted severe material damage on the South, damage that had a significant role in setting back the region's economic growth and development.3 That conclusion has also become the consensus among authors of United States history textbooks.4 Cliometricians have also addressed the question of southern economic retardation during the first few postwar decades. The first systematic examination of the evidence indicated that the war might have caused the loss of as much as $1.5 billion in physical capital in the South and a deep, long-lasting reduction in southern incomes.5 Further work on the question, however, [End Page 37] has sharply revised those findings downward. Analysis of data on capital investment, agricultural output, population, and income from the 1860 and 1880 federal census returns has led to the conclusion that, bad as the physical damage may have been, it was not a major reason for the South's economic woes during the decades following the war.6 Instead, they found other, more important causes: a general deterioration of property due to neglect during the war; a combination of cotton market forces, specifically global conditions of supply and demand; and the economic, social, and political upheaval in southern society following the war, as a consequence of emancipation.7 Today most economic historians subscribe to the cliometrical analysis of the causes of southern postwar economic retardation and its conclusion that the degree of physical destruction attributable to the war was not of long-term economic significance.8 As to the reasons for such damage, many historians [End Page 38] agree that, though the Union army destroyed a great deal of southern public and private property, relatively little wanton destruction occurred. Instead, destruction resulted largely from the controlled application of a formal military...

Germans in the Civil War: the letters they wrote home

Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home. Edited by Walter D. Kamphoefher & Wolfgang Helbich. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiv, 521. Illustrations, maps, glossary, index. Cloth, $59.95) Although United States history textbooks usually mention that about twenty-five percent of the soldiers who served in the Civil War were foreign born, the ethnic component of the war is generally neglected, especially the German element. Even television reflects this bias. Ken Burns's landmark series on the Civil War, for example, barely mentions the German immigrant soldiers. This is in spite of the fact that approximately 200,000 Germans served in the Union Army during the course of the war. Part of this neglect stems from the fact that most of the correspondence to and from German-American soldiers is in German, and most Americanists do not master a foreign language. In their book, Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home, Walter Kamphoefher and Wolfgang Helbich seek to rectify this problem by providing the reader with a rich collection of Civil War correspondence from German-Americans to their kinfolk in Europe. It is neatly divided into two parts. The first part is an excellent interpretive section by the editors spanning some seventy pages of preface and introduction. The second part is a very wide selection of letters from German participants in the War to their family members carefully translated by, coincidently, the great-greatgranddaughter of Robert E. Lee. The source carefully mined by the editors, and supplemented with plenty of other pertinent material, is the North America Letter Collection housed in the Forschungsbibliotek in Gotha, Germany. The collection consists of 956 letters from the period 1860-1865 written by 258 German immigrants and the editors selected 343 letters by 78 individuals as the focus of the book. The editors estimate that immigrants sent nearly four million letters to Germany during those years and that perhaps 500,000 came from soldiers. Because of this the editors cannot and do not claim their selections to be representative of the views of German immigrants, but rather to be illustrative of those views. Despite this disclaimer, Kamphoefner and Helbich argue that this book is useful not only as a primary source collection to be mined by others, but as an interpretive work in its own right illustrating the ethnic role and providing an ethnic perspective on the war (xiii). After carefully explaining their procedures and qualifying their right to generalize, the editors put forth three very important interpretive claims. First, they argue these German immigrants saw themselves as Germans regardless of their regional or confessional background. …

Impact of the Design of U.S. History Textbooks on Content Acquisition and Academic Engagement of Special Education Students: An Experimental Investigation

We used randomized controlled trials to compare the impact of the designs of 2 United States history textbooks on the content acquisition and behavior of 8th-grade students identified for special education services or identified as low achieving. We also investigated whether teachers differed in their use of instructional activities and questioning strategies based on the type of text used. Our findings suggest that students learned more history content, were more actively engaged, and answered more questions correctly when using the experimental textbook. Teachers used different activities depending on which textbook they used, but did not differ in types of questions asked.

U.S. National Security and Party Politics: The Consensus on Louisiana, 1789-1803

WITH THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the Louisiana Purchase, it is appropriate to once again examine the developments surrounding this sea change in American history. The purchase has been celebrated as the result of the vision of one man, Thomas Jefferson, and as the beginning of the great western expansion of the U.S. Yet the purchase should be understood not simply in the context of western expansion but of a young republic's quest for national security. In an oft-quoted statement, Jefferson declared: There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans . . . . The day France takes possession of New Orleans, fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. . . . From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.1 Jefferson was doing more than indulging in political hyperbole or expressing some solitary inspiration. he was reflecting a political consensus among national leaders that had developed since the founding of the Republic. It stressed the need for access to the Mississippi River and the importance of the Mississippi Valley to national security. An important party to this consensus, Federalists, has been accorded only a minor place in histories of the purchase. In United States history textbooks, for instance, the reaction of the Federalists to the purchase, if it is mentioned at all, is only given one or two sentences and generally focuses on the opposition in New England.2 The support of leading Federalists, such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, is seldom mentioned. The United States' concerns over Louisiana between 1789 and 1803 have been the subject of much study, but less attention has been paid to the role these concerns played in prompting leading Federalists to support purchase of the territory. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's work on the early republic, The Age of Federalism, shows the importance of national security concerns to the early Federalist governments, but it does so by looking at domestic politics and not directly at attitudes about Louisiana and, in any case, ends with Jefferson's assumption of the presidency.3 James Lewis in American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood notes leading policy makers' commitment to securing the goals of the Revolution against the problem of neighborhood . . . as they responded to changing conditions throughout the New World between 1783 and 1815.4 But he makes little reference to the attitudes and reasons behind Federalist support of the purchase and says nothing about pre-1800 rumors of retrocession of Louisiana to France. Other studies make more of Federalist enthusiasm for the purchase. Daniel Lang in Foreign Policy in the Early Republic argues that party leader Alexander Hamilton saw the acquisition of those countries [Louisiana and the Floridas] as essential to the permanency of the Union.5 Alexander DeConde's This Affair of Louisiana notes that even before 1800 it was not Republicans alone who saw possession of Louisiana in the United States' future. Like Jefferson, policy makers in the new American government thought of Louisiana and the Floridas as being held by the Spanish in a kind of trusteeship.6 Federalist leaders besides Hamilton also desired Louisiana and the Floridas.7 But Federalist reactions to the Louisiana Purchase merit further study. The national security concerns faced by Federalist administrations between 1789 and 1801 helped lead Federalists who had served in these governments as officers and diplomats-they might be termed national Federalists-to a consensus with Republicans on the status of Louisiana. They accepted Jefferson's purchase, in spite of opposition within their own party and the possibility that the new territory, like other parts of the West, would become heavily Republican. Louisiana's strategic and economic importance was immense. …

The struggle for American identity: treatment of ethnic groups in United States history textbooks

(1999). The struggle for American identity: treatment of ethnic groups in United States history textbooks. History of Education: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 251-278.

Out of the Streets and into the Classroom? The New Left and the Counterculture in United States History Textbooks

The United States history survey course has become a battlefield in the contemporary culture wars. Both within and outside the academy, conservative critics complained that the standard textbook narrative represents a triumph of 1960s radicalism. What the New Left could not accomplish on the barricades, it achieved in the classroom. A small angry group of anti-American radicals, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, have bullied their way into the power positions in academia. Driven underground, the countercultural politics of sixties radicals survived and triumphed, insidiously filling the textbooks and poisoning the minds of today's students with radical propaganda. It is a cheap-shot, leftist point-of-view of history, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said of the proposed national history standards, a document that reflected the prevailing consensus in contemporary American historical scholarship. Everything that is European or American, or has to do with white people is evil and oppressive.'

Accounts of Slavery: An Analysis of United States History Textbooks from 1900 to 1992

The presentation of slavery in United States history texts varies dramatically across five time periods from 1900 to 1992. During the first third of this century, textbook authors present slavery in a neutral way. During the Great Depression and World War II, authors justify slavery by appealing to the needs of the market. The late 1950s and the 1960s see the introduction of some limited discussion of the moral wrongs of slavery, while the texts of the late 1960s and the 1970s begin to express an awareness of the value of social diversity. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the presentation of slavery reflects the nation's growing conservatism and the increased influence of the religious right.

Harry Truman and the Liberal Tradition: A Textbook Survey

Michael Henry is a history teacher at Bowie High School in Prince George s County, Maryland. Introduction Today, the country is in the midst of a Harry Truman renais sance. Although Truman's liberalism may seem out of step with today's smaller government rhetoric, popular opinion of the man from Missouri has risen in the last quarter century. Since his death in 1972, and with the Watergate crisis of 1974, he has grown in the nation's heart to a position of hero worship and adulation (1). Currendy he is viewed as an uncomplicated, honest and decisive man (2). As Newsweek said on the centennial of his birth in 1984, did not have what is known as a 'hidden agenda' as (3). After the duplicity and disingenuousness of our Presidents during Vietnam and Watergate, these were qualities the country admired in a leader. Among politicians and historians, the 33rd President is also riding high. He is consistendy rated among our top ten chief executives in presidential polls. Even Republicans have embraced his memory. President Ford placed a bust of Truman in the Oval Office during his administration. And President Reagan reportedly had a paperweight on his desk that proclaimed Buck Stops Here? one of Truman's favorite sayings (4). Truman's domestic agenda was an unabashed attempt to expand the powers of the federal government that began in the 1930s. He pushed for expansion of Social Security, public housing, civil rights and old age-health insurance. Over the half century since Truman's Presidency, there has been a growing skepticism about the role of the federal government in society. Currently, when the appeal of big government appears over, Truman's liberal views might seem out of place, and he an unlikely hero. Given the nation's mood of less government involvement and in this golden anniversary era of the Truman Presidency, this is an appropriate time to compare his popular persona with his depiction in our public schools today. Specifically, one may ask how widely used, United States history textbooks currendy appraise Truman? Are students likely to find in these books a view of the 33rd President that coincides with his assessment in the general society? Do textbooks see his attempt to extend the New Deal as positive or negative? Is Truman presented as an effective leader who expanded the powers of the government with the approval of the nation and the Congress? Or, is his legacy more of a personal one, with his character admired, but his political agenda criticized as out of step with the late 1940s and early 1950s? In order to answer these questions, I reviewed Truman's domestic program as presented in eight widely used United States history books. The books are found in average to above average

Schooling, the Hidden Curriculum, and Children's Conceptions of Poverty

Social Policy ReportVolume 11, Issue 1 p. 1-28 ReportFree Access Schooling, the Hidden Curriculum, and Children's Conceptions of Poverty Judith A. Chafel, Judith A. ChafelSearch for more papers by this author Judith A. Chafel, Judith A. ChafelSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 March 1997 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2379-3988.1997.tb00004.xCitations: 6AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat References Anyon, J. (1979a). Ideology and United States history textbooks. Harvard Educational Review, 49, 361– 386. Anyon, J. (1979b). Education, social “structure” and the power of individuals. Theory and Research in Social Education, 7, 49– 59. Apple, M. (1990). Ideology and curriculum. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. (1993). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. (1995). Education and power. New York: Routledge. Apple, M., with King, N. (1990). Economics and control in everyday school life. In M. Apple, Ideology and curriculum (pp. 43– 60). New York: Routledge. Aronowitz, S., & Bologh, R. (1983). Introduction. In H. Giroux, Theory and resistance in education (pp. xi– xii). New York: Bergin & Garvey. Bianchi, S. (1993). Children of poverty: Why are they poor? In J. Chafel (Ed.), Child poverty and public policy (pp. 91– 125). Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press. Blank, R. (1989). Poverty and policy: The many faces of the poor. In C. R. Strain (Ed.), Prophetic visions and economic realities (pp. 156– 168). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's Publishing Co. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1988a). Prologue: The correspondence principle. In M. Cole (Ed.), Bowles and Gintis revisited: Correspondence and contradiction in educational theory (pp. 1– 4). London: Falmer Press. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1988b). Schooling in capitalist America: Reply to our critics. In M. Cole (Ed.), Bowles and Gintis revisited: Correspondence and contradiction in educational theory (pp. 235– 245). London: Falmer Press. Chafel, J. (1995). Childrens conceptions of poverty. In S. Reifel (Ed.), Advances in early education and day care, (Vol. 7, pp. 27– 57). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Chafel, J. (1997a). Childrens views of poverty: A review of research and implications for teaching. The Educational Forum, 61, 360– 371. Chafel, J. (1997b). 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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Flanagan, C., Ingram, P., Gallay, E., & Gallay, E. (1997). Why are people poor? Social conditions and adolescents' interpretations of the social contract. In R. D. Taylor & M. C. Wang (Eds.), Social and emotional adjustment and family relations in ethnic minority families (pp. 53– 62). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Furby, L. (1979). Inequalities in personal possessions: Explanations for and judgements about unequal distribution. Human Development, 22, 180– 202. Furby, L., Harter, S., & John, K. (1975). The nature and development of possession and ownership: A cognitive-attitudinal study of 5-to 21-year-olds. Oreg. Res. Inst. Res. Monogr., 15(4). Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and resistance in education. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Hall, W., & Jose, P. (1983). Cultural effects on the development of equality and inequality. In R. Leahy (Ed.), The child's construction of social inequality (pp. 253– 285). New York: Academic Press. Harrah, J., & Friedman, M. 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The case of the missing brackets: Teachers and social reproduction. Journal of Education, 169, 78– 88. Money income in the United States: 1995 (with separate data on valuation of noncash benefits) (P60–193). (1997, February 6) [on line]. Available on Netscape: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income95.html Ramsey, P. (1991). Young children's awareness and understanding of social class differences. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 152, pp. 71– 82. Simmons, R., & Rosenberg, M. (1971). Functions of children's perceptions of the stratification system. American Sociological Review, 36, 235– 249. Sleeter, C., & Grant, C. (1991). Race, class, gender, and disability in current textbooks. In M. Apple & L. Christian-Smith (Eds.), The politics of the textbook (pp. 78– 110). New York: Routledge. Weinberg, D. (1996a, September 26). Press briefing on 1995 income, poverty, and health insurance estimates [on line]. Available on Netscape: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income95.html Weinberg, D. 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Reconstruction in United States History Textbooks

ence. That incoherence leads historians ultimately to invoke either inappropriate psychological analyses (of individuals or groups) or literary flourishes about tragic flaws in the American character- all in lieu of probing the historical forces at work. In its abbreviated form, as found in many United States history surveys, that narrative conveys the sense that there were several parallel sequences of events and developments, which were largely unrelated and disconnected. Some historical periods do resist the historian's attempt to impose a coherent narrative because they were, in fact, not coherent. But, given that Reconstruction America had just fought an enormous war, which had focused its energies and resources in ways heretofore unimaginable, and that the forces set loose by that war continued to unfold in the postwar decade, incoherence seems unlikely. Three of the textbooks under review here adhere to the traditional approach. other four project strong conceptual or thematic schemes that lend order and perspective to their narrations. One may disagree with them, but there is something substantive to be debated. But even those texts that have avoided the incoherences of the conventional narrative fail adequately to account for the collapse of especially the betrayal of the political and economic aspirations of the freed people. Of the discussions of Reconstruction in these seven texts, the fourteen-page treatment in A Short History of the American Nation by John A. Garraty and Robert A. McCaughey is the most typical of the conventional narrative of the Reconstruction era; or, perhaps more accurately, it marks an incomplete transition away from what was conventional several decades ago.' Its twelve brief sections signal that its concerns are primarily with formal politics: Presidential Reconstruction, Republican Radicals, The Fourteenth Amendment, The Reconstruction Acts, Congress Takes Charge, The Fifteenth Amendment, 'Black Republican' Reconstruction, The Ravaged Land, The White Counterrevolution, Grant as President, The Disputed Election of 1876, and The Compromise of 1877.

The Origins of the Cold War in United States History Textbooks

impact of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union on American politics and society during the post-World War II era can hardly be overstated. As Gary B. Nash and his coauthors point out in their textbook, American People, The Cold War was the greatest single force affecting American society during the decade and a half after World War II.' Scholars must therefore use the Cold War as the starting point for explanations of American diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history in the post-1945 era. importance of the Cold War in shaping American politics and society is perhaps obvious to those who lived through it. For the baby boom generation, the dramas that the Cold War produced around the globe, from Greece to Berlin to Korea to Cuba to Vietnam, were vivid events that made a lasting impact, at least on members' impressions of, or attitudes toward, world and national affairs. How and why the Cold War began was an issue of immediate political relevance as well as a question for historical analysis. But for students who are just coming of age, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the sources of all the excitement, fear, and tension. end of the Cold War is likely to obscure the roots of the passions it aroused. As the Cold War fades into distant collective memory, the reasons why Americans attached life-and-death significance to the struggle with the Soviet Union will become less apparent. trend is under way; John Lewis Gaddis has recently observed that our students are already beginning to raise [the question of] what the Cold War was all about in the first place.2 Those students, even more than their predecessors, will need to be educated about the Cold War and its implications for the development of modern American society.

Religion in United States History Textbooks

PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS BEEN BESET in recent years by one controversy after another involving religion. As American society has become increasingly secular, public schools have often become the center of the debate over the degree to which religion should be confined to the private realm. School prayer, the teaching of evolution, aid to parochial schools, and religious content in commencement ceremonies are just few of the issues that continue to be debated. While some of these issues have been concerns for many years, another controversy involving religion and education has arisen in just the last decade. This is the question of whether history books have unfairly excluded religious events and personalities from America's past. Many significant events in American history involve religion. Yet because religious issues can create strong emotional response, and textbook publishers want to avoid any possible controversy that could hurt sales,' the concern has been raised by many in recent years that textbooks are deliberately avoiding religious topics.2 A great deal of publicity has been given to studies that found such things as an elementary social studies textbook that defined Christmas only as a warm time for special foods or European history texts that skipped the Reformation, rather than having to explain

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

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.

The Politics and Pedagogy of Popular Culture in Contemporary Textbooks

What is the place of popular culture in United States history textbooks? Inside these unified chronologies about the public exercise of political, military, and economic power, is there room for the ways that ordinary people make meaning for themselves in their everyday activities? Scholarly study of popular culture is not an exercise in comic relief from the more serious study of public power, but rather a process of discerning how power relations writ large throughout society manifest themselves in common experiences. Consequently, popular culture can present important opportunities for examining the lives of people who rarely appear directly in accounts of politics, economics, and war, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, the people who do not leave their private papers to historical museums, who do not write memoirs, and who rarely if ever see their names in the newspaper. In the past decade the study of popular culture has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in United States social history. Blending an anthropological sensitivity to the uses and effects of culture with traditional historical concerns about change over time, innovative scholars have found answers to important historical questions in seemingly insignificant sites and practices, ranging from the dime novel to the dance hall, from pageants to parades, from museums to the movies, from the blues to the beer parlor.1

Mexico, Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Secondary-School United States History Textbooks

IT IS NOW RATHER COMMONPLACE to decry the poor quality of United States history textbooks at the university and precollegiate levels. Criticisms range from the general to the specific. While the first include such practices as dumbing down (that is, the rewriting of texts for a lower reading level than their intended audience should have already attained), the second focus more directly upon content.' Often inspired by well-defined political agendas, these criticisms encompass issues of inclusion or omission of certain topics and the endorsement of particular values or behavior. Special-interest lobbying to change textbook content is well worth the effort, however, since American history textbooks are the single most significant source of information on many vital topics for high-school teachers as well as their students. Textbook treatments of Mexico, Mexicans and Mexican Americans are a case in point. American students are usually introduced to Mexico in primary-school geography and middle-school world history. However, it is secondaryschool United States history textbooks that offer the fullest, most sophisticated and widely disseminated images of Mexico and its peoples.2 At a time when United States relations with Mexico command ever greater attention, when Mexican Americans represent one of the fastest-growing

A Review of Slave Life in Fourteen United States History Textbooks

Although slavery in the United States of America was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the coverage of slavery in U.S. history textbooks used in public schools has been a delicate and disputed topic from the Civil War era to the present. In Virginia, for example, the heartland of the Confederacy, state history textbooks widely used in public schools from the late 1950s to the early '70s contained passages such as the following: loved the United States and did not want to leave it. But Virginians wanted people in every state to have their rights.' This excerpt from Virginia's fourth grade textbook had a very limited view of who were the people that should have rights, as apparently slaves were not considered people. The seventh grade Virginia textbook had similar misinformed views of slavery. For example: Slavery made it possible for the Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life and to play an important part in the development of Virginia.2 Clearly, there was no civilization existing in Africa if one accepts this view. The same text had this portrayal of the life of a slave: Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked.3 This cheery