What is the history of the textbook?

In some regions, the textbook may have been a student’s—and a teacher’s—only source for history. Europeans called the use of textbooks “the American system” of education. By the 1890s, the public schools had more students than the private academies. Textbook sales correspondingly increased then and in ensuing decades.

What do textbooks teach us about America?

“Textbooks are supposed to teach us a common set of facts about who we are as Americans and what stories are key to our democracy,” said Alana D. Murray, a Maryland middle-school principal and author of The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative.

What are the taboos of American history textbooks?

The taboos of polite conversation—politics and religion—have been at the core of American history textbook controversies for over a century (See Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present by Joseph Moreau [2003]).

What was the most famous textbook dispute in American history?

In he 1960s his book was held up to scorn by liberals, who disparaged his blatant racism and paternalism. In 1925, a science book provoked perhaps the most well-known American textbook dispute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okcfKaC87r4

What should students know about textbooks?

“Textbooks are just a version of text, just like every single document that we read to learn about the past. Students should know and understand that the textbook is a source of information, and therefore it has a writer and a context that it was written in and a moment in history that it was written in.”

Who wrote the first black history book?

The zeal to correct and counter other people’s accounts of black history motivated people like North Carolina’s Edward A. Johnson, a black lawyer who released his own textbook, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619-1819 in 1890.