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Full-Text Articles in Education

Reconstruction Retold: Perspectives From 20th Century Us Secondary History Textbooks, Lyric Church May 2024

Reconstruction Retold: Perspectives From 20th Century Us Secondary History Textbooks, Lyric Church

Honors Theses

Since the creation of the American public school system, the use of the textbook has been vital to history education. It has been the primary tool used by educators to teach children about the past to help them understand the present and shape the future. To this day, in the modern technological age, they are, still, used in classrooms across the country. This thesis investigates the effects of changing societal thought on United States history textbooks used in the secondary classroom, using the Reconstruction Era as the area of study. Analyzing multiple textbooks from each decade of the twentieth century, …


Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Portrayal Of The Reconstruction Era In High School History Textbooks, Eleanor Katari Aug 2023

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Portrayal Of The Reconstruction Era In High School History Textbooks, Eleanor Katari

Graduate Masters Theses

This paper examines the persistence of Dunning School narratives of the Reconstruction Era in high school US History textbooks, despite the thorough rejection of those narratives among academic historians at the college level and above. In examining the reasons for the persistence of these narratives, this paper acknowledges some structural elements of the textbook industry before focusing on the role of white women’s parent activism in shaping textbook content and adoption, stretching backwards to the 1890s and the Daughters of Confederate Veterans, and forward to the present day and organizations such as Moms for Liberty. This paper also points out …


A Battle Over 20th Century Textbooks: How The Civil War Is Still Fought In American Classrooms, Katie Court Mar 2021

A Battle Over 20th Century Textbooks: How The Civil War Is Still Fought In American Classrooms, Katie Court

History

This paper analyzed the emergence of Lost Cause history textbooks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the Civil War, Confederate societies such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and United Confederate Veterans had a vested interest in positively portraying the South. From 1890-1930, Confederate societies attempted to expel textbooks that spoke unfavorably of the Confederacy, and instead encouraged states all around the country to follow stringent rules of how to discuss historical events. This research was led by material written by these societies and the textbooks they endorsed or expelled, in order to analyze the origins …