![]() ![]() ![]() Historians may occasionally bemoan their lack of influence, but as my appraisal of our nation’s textbooks revealed, historians of the twentieth century exerted an enormous impact on the way modern Americans have come to understand their history. While the worst features of our textbook legacy have ended, as the recently published study (2018) by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery shows, our schools are still ignoring the difficult issues raised by our past, and the themes, facts, and attitudes of supremacist ideologies remain embedded in our national identity, in what we teach, and in what we learn. This vast tectonic plate still underlies American culture and we ignore it at our peril. The assumptions of white priority and white domination suffuse every chapter and every theme of the thousands of textbooks that have blanketed the schools of our country. One text even began with the capitalized title: “The White Man’s History.” Across time and with precious few exceptions African Americans in these books appeared only as a problem, only as “ignorant negroes,” as slaves, and as anonymous abstractions that only posed “problems” for the real subjects of this written history: white people of European descent. This new project, Teaching White Supremacy: The Battle Over Race in American History Textbooks, for me is offering almost daily revelations.Īfter reviewing my first fifty or so textbooks, one morning I realized precisely what I was seeing, what instruction, and what priorities were leaping from the pages into the brains of the children compelled to read them: White Supremacy. Unintentionally, I am now engaged in a study of how abolitionism, race, slavery, and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught in our nation’s school books from the 1830s to the present. history textbooks, dating from about 1800 to the 1980s. Instead, I found myself immersed in the Gutman Library’s invaluable collection of nearly three thousand U.S. I imagined a quick look and then a deep plunge back into a series of manuscript collections for The Liberator’s Legacy. As part of that project, I wanted to determine how abolitionism had been presented in our school textbooks. Du Bois John Jay Chapman and William Monroe Trotter and the Boston African American community depended upon and employed the legacy of the antislavery movement to create the modern civil rights movement. I wished to look at how the Garrison children and grandchildren the founders of the NAACP like Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and W.E.B. My project, The Liberator’s Legacy: Memory, Abolitionism, and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1865–1965, aims at assessing the impact of William Lloyd Garrison and his antislavery colleagues, both black and white. Does Houston have any association of people interested in historical transportation services? I’m intending to vet this souvenir through the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, sometime this summer, assuming I can find a “square tuit.” Mainly, I want to be certain it finds a useful home for posterity.I began research in textbooks as part of a broader study of the legacy of the antislavery movement. The most remarkable thing about the map is that it shows the bus and streetcar lines of the period! This is a particular interest of mine. Obviously it must have been printed on acid-free paper! I would describe the map as being in very good condition for its age. Foster Ashburn (a respected name in local maps for the southwestern states, in my personal recollection). ![]() Entitled “Official Street Map and Guide” and distributed by the Houston Chamber of Commerce, the map was produced and copyrighted by J. I have come into possession of a map of Houston, which, although not specifically dated, includes statistics for 1936. ![]() proposed streets in red)ġ961 – Railroad and highway Map of Houston (W) 1920 – Street Map of Houston (showing wards)ġ942 – Street map of Houston (inc. ![]()
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