This website focuses primarily on middle- and high-school level history textbooks, as the overwhelming majority of American
students did not yet receive a postsecondary education. Below are examples of several textbooks from this era in U.S. History.
Major publishing houses were beginning to acquire larger shares of the market, but some textbooks were still locally published.
Originally, history textbooks used in school classrooms were rather bland — they consisted of writing full of information and not
much else. There were some illustrations, but they were merely supplements to the writing; they did not seem to add much to
students’ understanding of topics.
Common Stereotypes and Biases
Due to the prevailing influences of Social Darwinism and eugenics at this period in American history, many textbook authors
(who were still white) presented minority racial and ethnic groups in negative terms, especially Native Americans and blacks.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in particular, had plenty to say about how textbook authors represented African-Americans in the Progressive
Era. He shows that black Americans were often portrayed as less than ideal. A choice quotation from page 345 of Hubert Cornish
and Thomas Hughes’ History of the United States for Schools states, “‘In the South, the Negroes who had so suddenly gained
their freedom did not know what to do with it.’”[1] This was just one of many remarks made in an attempt to show that blacks
were not yet worthy of the full privileges of United States citizenship.
Emerson David Fite, another prominent academic during this period, made the rather ill-informed decision to place a picture of a
Ku Klux Klan trial among text describing recently freed black slaves:[2]
Native Americans were also heavily stereotyped, as another page from the same book shows:[3]
So although Progressive-Era academic historians tried to make history seem “less heroic,” they also made it more racially
stereotypical.
Sources
[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, New York: Atheneum, 1992, orig. published 1935), 711.
[2] Emerson David Fite, History of the United States (New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), 417.
[3] Ibid., 23.
Back to Main Page for History 502: Digital Media and Technology in History
Introduction: Overview of the Teaching of History
How History Has Usually Been Taught
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?