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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Complicity of the Textbooks
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/the-complicity-of-the-textbooks-teaching-white-supremacy/No paywall
https://archive.ph/HRHFa
Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Boiss Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most of the groupings are unexceptionalfor example, monographs, government reports, and biographies. But Du Boiss first and largest category comes as a shock to the modern reader: it consists of books by historians who believe African Americans to be sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage. Just before the bibliography, Du Bois includes a chapter, The Propaganda of History, that indicts the profession for abandoning scholarly objectivity in the service of that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few. This was the state of historical scholarship in the United States when Black Reconstruction was published, in 1935.
As part of his research, Du Bois scoured history textbooks to see what was being taught in American classrooms about Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War, when laws and the Constitution were rewritten in an attempt to make the US, for the first time, an interracial democracy. Students learned that Reconstruction was the lowest point in the American saga, a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting the right to vote to Black men. The violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, the books related, was an understandable response by white southerners to the horrors of Negro rule. The heroes of this narrative were the self-styled white Redeemers who restored what they called home rule to the South, the villains northern abolitionists who irresponsibly set North against South, bringing on a needless civil war. Du Bois was well aware that what is said in history classrooms has an impact beyond the schoolhouse. The history of Reconstruction taught throughout the country proved that nonwhite peoples are congenitally incapable of intelligent self-government.
Now, nearly a century later, Donald Yacovone, an associate at Harvard Universitys Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and a prolific writer on African American history, has published Teaching White Supremacy, which follows in Du Boiss footsteps by tracing what textbooks, over the course of our history, have said about slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and race relations more generally. Yacovone examined hundreds of texts held in the library of Harvards Graduate School of Education, published from the early nineteenth century to the 1980sa heroic effort that few historians are likely to wish to emulate. Some of the authors were well-known scholars. Most will be unfamiliar even to specialists in the history of educationwriters such as John Bonner, Marcius Willson, and Egbert Guernsey.
From the beginning, Yacovone concludes, American education has served the needs of white supremacy. Well into the twentieth century, he finds, most textbooks said little about slavery or portrayed it as a mild institution that helped lift savage Blacks into the realm of civilization. From generation to generation the books made no mention of Blacks role in helping to shape the nations development. They ignored Black participation in the crusade against slavery and the Civil War and portrayed Reconstruction as a disaster caused primarily by Black incapacity. Many of these textbooks were produced by the nations leading publishing housesLittle, Brown; Scribners; Harper and Brothers; Macmillan; and Yale and Oxford University Presses, to name just a few.
*snip*
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The Complicity of the Textbooks (Original Post)
Nevilledog
Sep 2022
OP
Solly Mack
(90,765 posts)1. K&R
Wounded Bear
(58,649 posts)2. K & R...for visibility...nt
Docreed2003
(16,858 posts)3. K&R
keithbvadu2
(36,793 posts)4. Revisionist history of slavery.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215538945
Revisionist history of slavery.
Dubya was well known for using that term but he was an amateur compared to the 'history' of slavery.
https://tinyurl.com/56x367up
https://www.google.com/search?q=revisionist+history+dubya&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk00sTiyO4iWX4VBKrHLL5tuZfhk73Q%3A1624032794302&ei=GsbMYKntEaaHggfQ-5RQ&oq=revisionist+history+dubya&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAwyBQghEKABMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABOgcIIxCwAxAnOgcIABBHELADOgcIABCwAxBDOgIIADoECAAQQzoFCAAQzQJQwogEWOanBGDlywRoAXACeACAAfMDiAHQCZIBBzAuNi40LTGYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6yAEKwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwip4rrOyaHxAhWmg-AKHdA9BQoQ4dUDCA0
https://civilrightsheritage.com/2019/10/03/happy-slaves-described-in-7th-grade-virginia-textbook-used-for-20-yrs/
Happy Slaves Described In 7th Grade Virginia Textbook Used for 20 Yrs.
?w=768
Revisionist history of slavery.
Dubya was well known for using that term but he was an amateur compared to the 'history' of slavery.
https://tinyurl.com/56x367up
https://www.google.com/search?q=revisionist+history+dubya&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=ALeKk00sTiyO4iWX4VBKrHLL5tuZfhk73Q%3A1624032794302&ei=GsbMYKntEaaHggfQ-5RQ&oq=revisionist+history+dubya&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAwyBQghEKABMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABOgcIIxCwAxAnOgcIABBHELADOgcIABCwAxBDOgIIADoECAAQQzoFCAAQzQJQwogEWOanBGDlywRoAXACeACAAfMDiAHQCZIBBzAuNi40LTGYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6yAEKwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwip4rrOyaHxAhWmg-AKHdA9BQoQ4dUDCA0
https://civilrightsheritage.com/2019/10/03/happy-slaves-described-in-7th-grade-virginia-textbook-used-for-20-yrs/
Happy Slaves Described In 7th Grade Virginia Textbook Used for 20 Yrs.
?w=768
Nevilledog
(51,098 posts)5. Kick