Schoolbook nation: Imagining the American community in United States history texts for grammar and secondary schools, 1865-1930.

During the 1980s and 1990s, prominent liberals and conservatives in education, including Lynne Cheney, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., criticized what they saw as a fragmenting of the history curriculum in America's schools. Different ethnic, religious, and other groups who demanded instruction on their own terms threatened the academic subject's traditional role in helping to unify a diverse citizenry, these commentators argued. Properly taught, truthful history transcends divisions of geography, race, religion, and class to inculcate in children a respect for the common political and cultural heritage of the nation-state. Implicit in this critique was an understanding that history teaching had once better served these goals, and that it had once been more uniform and less politicized in content. I tried to test the validity of these claims by examining how history textbooks for grammar and secondary schools published between 1865 and 1930 depicted the national community. While I analyzed the content of these books, I also considered how social and political forces shaped that content. I found that while historians and educators have repeatedly tried to create a single, coherent national narrative for schools, their work has been thwarted by various pressure groups. Public struggle over the history curriculum has been the norm since the 1870s, not the exception. No common understanding of the nation's past appeared in textbooks throughout most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, publishers sold different sets of texts to three distinct markets: public schools in the North and West, public schools in the South, and Catholic schools across the country. While a trend toward a more unified national story did appear by 1930, it resulted from the willingness of historians to abandon an official stance of objectivity and to incorporate visions of different activists into popular schoolbooks. This research is based on examination of approximately 100 textbooks selected on the basis of widespread use; records of textbook adoption in eight states; correspondence of text publishers; and an array of primary and secondary sources. Five chapters examine the development of the first national narratives in the nineteenth century; the appearance of counter-narratives for students in Catholic and Southern schools; the relationship between ideas of race and nation in histories; and the campaign against pro-British history in the 1920s.PhDAmerican historyCurriculum developmentEducationPhysical anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131959/2/9938497.pd