About This Project
This project, prepared for my History 502 class, was my first digital project involving the creation of a website. It provides an
overview of how textbooks and teachers’ guides were published, and may have been used, in Progressive-Era public school
classrooms in the United States. It also includes hyperlinks to some of the resources I used in making this project.
Rote memorization and drilling children on facts, especially in history, has a well-established presence in our nation’s
classrooms. Unfortunately for their students, many instructors prefer to simply “tell the facts” and let the students soak it all in,
ready to fill in the answer blanks on the next quiz or test. But this is not how history is actually conducted; rather, history involves
considerable research, especially in primary source documents, as well as ongoing debates. Because we cannot live in the past, we
have to do our best to piece together and make sense of the fragments of information that survive from the past. Even if we were
able to go back in time, however, we would still have different perspectives on the same events and developments.
These pages display and analyze actual text from school textbooks and teachers’ guides that people in the early 20th century
have used in a classroom setting. Of course, this is only a small sample of the total material, as much of it has vanished into the
sands of time. However, those materials that are available do provide a useful starting point for analyzing the attitudes and
perceptions of the academians of that era.
Please click on a link below to visit the respective page.
Introduction: Overview of the Teaching of History
How History Has Usually Been Taught
Students’ History Textbooks in Progressive-Era America
Instructors’ Guides for U.S. History in the Early 20th Century
What Can We Do to Make History More Exciting for Our Children and Teenagers?