Schoolbook Nation

In an ambitious survey of the nation's history textbooks, the author looks back on 150 years of history instruction in America, tackling 100 primary texts used to instruct, inform, propagandize, and deceive the nation's youth throughout the nation's short life-span. (Education)

When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, but the Times didn’t back down. Instead the authors ballooned their original magazine supplement into a 600-page book. Peter Wood’s 1620 was a point-by-point response to the 1619 Project. He argued that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. The quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of those Mayflower immigrants. In this new edition of 1620, Wood brings the story up to date, including the glittering prizes for 1619 pseudo-history, the deepening disputes, and the roles played by Presidents Trump and Biden. Much of the controversy involves education. Schools across the country raced to adopt the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. Parents in many districts have rebelled. Should children be taught that America is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

DIVAn unbiased examination of the century-and-a-half-long culture wars fought in the pages of our country's history texts /div

In this book, leading historian of education Jeffrey E. Mirel retells a story we think we know, in which public schools forced a draconian Americanization on the great waves of immigration of a century ago. Ranging from the 1890s through the World War II years, Mirel argues that Americanization was a far more nuanced and negotiated process from the start, much shaped by immigrants themselves.Drawing from detailed descriptions of Americanization programs for both schoolchildren and adults in three cities (Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit) and from extensive analysis of foreign-language newspapers, Mirel shows how immigrants confronted different kinds of Americanization. When native-born citizens contemptuously tried to force them to forsake their home religions, languages, or histories, immigrants pushed back strongly. While they passionately embraced key aspects of Americanization—the English language, American history, democratic political ideas, and citizenship—they also found in American democracy a defense of their cultural differences. In seeing no conflict between their sense of themselves as Italians, or Germans, or Poles, and Americans, they helped to create a new and inclusive vision of this country.Mirel vividly retells the epic story of one of the great achievements of American education, which has profound implications for the Americanization of immigrants today.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s this book explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation. For decades white women performed duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right.

WINNER: CBCA Book of the Year, Eve Pownell Award for Information Books, 2002 This multi-award-winning book tells the story of how Anangu from five different language groups came to live together at Papunya. From the time of first contacts with explorers, missionaries and pastoralists, through to the Papunya art movement and the Warumpi Band, this multi-layered text finally leads us to the development of the unique educational environment that is Papunya School. As an example of two way learning, it is a profound metaphor for reconciliation.