Three Videos and an Interview on School Wars

"In many ways, debates are the same."

Conservative attempts to ban books reached historic highs last year and are on pace to set new records in 2022. I spoke to Dr. Joseph Moreau, a history teacher in New York, about challenges to inclusive history in classrooms reaching back 150 years. Dr. Moreau is the author of School Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present.

We also have three new Skipped videos, tracing this history in more depth and featuring a variety of sources! You can find the videos here, and a condensed transcript with Dr. Moreau, edited for clarity, below. Paying subscribers can access audio of our full conversation here.

Neither of us won awards for our backdrops but we still had a good time

Ben: Dr. Moreau, thank you so much for being here.

JM: Thank you for having me.

Ben: Today I’d like to explore the origins of wars over history curricula in schools. To ground our conversation, let’s head back to the Civil War. How did textbook writers present the war immediately after such a divisive time? 

JM: In 1866, ‘67, and ‘68, a larger meta-narrative about the Civil War and what it meant didn’t exist yet. So a lot of early textbooks would just tack on a chapter about the Civil War, and say here are the key events and the key battles. There was no analysis of what the war meant for slavery or the supremacy of the national government. This became known as the “telegraphic style.” 

The telegraphic style worked well if you wanted to avoid offending people and of course, the Civil War was catastrophic with 750,000 deaths. There were a lot of bitter feelings. There was no easy way to deal with it.

Ben: Yeah, it's almost like the textbook authors were still processing the war themselves. How did people react to this intentionally (or aspirationally) inoffensive style? 

JM: The truth is there isn't that much data. As a scholar, I would've loved to get a textbook that was all marked up and underlined with comments in the margin, but that doesn’t exist.

Ben: You're outing yourself as a history teacher here, wanting to see students’ thought processes.

JM: Yes, well... when organizations of Union and Confederate veterans began to oppose the textbooks, that’s when we really begin to see evidence of citizens criticizing them saying, Well, we don't like this part, or you need to add this battle because it's not complete. 

Confederate veterans advocated for a Lost Cause version of history to appear in textbooks, which romanticized the South and slavery. Predictably, Union veterans preferred stronger castigations of the Confederacy as traitorous.

Ben: And yet, as you write and I explore in the videos, the Confederates’ preferred version of history triumphed over Union vets’ desired portrayal. How did the Confederate veterans prevail?

JM: The big reason is that it became more common at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century for states in the South to adopt textbooks at the state level: either to say, here's the one textbook that all high schoolers or middle schoolers will use on American history or here are three or four acceptable ones. 

The United Confederate Veterans (and United Daughters of the Confederacy) could go to a state adoption board, which was typically sympathetic to their views, and mention all the problems they had with certain books and effectively get them excluded from the state’s list. Or they could communicate directly with publishers and ask them to remove or add things. Because they had the sales of a whole state hanging over the publishers, their voice was very powerful.

Conversely, for the most part in the North, education decisions were made on a more local level, so Union vets could only contact local officials. They didn't have that one statewide lever to force changes.

Ben: So, in essence, the Union veterans got outplayed. Fast forwarding a few decades, how did battles over textbooks and the teaching of Black history emerge during the Civil Rights Movement?

JM: Well, it's important to add that it wasn’t just organized veterans and Lost Cause advocates in the South who ended up determining a history of the Civil War that was sympathetic to the Confederacy. That was the primary factor, but racism was pervasive throughout the US, which made it easier for many people in the North and West to accept a Confederate version of events. Racial attitudes around the country undoubtedly contributed to the broader ignoring of the fact that the Civil War was a battle over whether human beings should be able to own one another.

Those extra factors help explain why by the time we get to the 1950s and 1960s, textbooks that either entirely or almost entirely ignored African American history were the norm. When they did mention Black history, they’d include terrible tropes, including ideas that enslaved people weren’t interested in being freed. 

Ben: In one example, you cite a 1961 book for eighth graders that includes a series of “Freedom Documents” from US history—without mentioning the Emancipation Proclamation.

JM: Yeah, bizarre, but of course, it made perfect sense to generations of white citizens who’d grown up learning that the Civil War wasn’t about ending slavery but was rather “a war between the states,” focused on taxes.

But in the 60s, Black parents began demanding the integration of US history in schools. A book called Land of the Free was one of the first textbooks from the 1960s to tell American history in a way that integrated the African American experience, not as an add-on or a sidebar, but as a running storyline. Written by a few authors, including prominent Black historian John Hope Franklin, Land of the Free was one of the first books that really approached the transformative nature of the Civil War in a profound way.

Yet their book so challenged conservative understanding of what the country was about that it quickly became a target for politicians, especially in California. There, conservatives argued that if a book dealt honestly with the history of racism, it would undermine patriotism in kids. And, just as they do now, politicians grabbed on to debates over curricula to energize their constituents during election cycles.

Ben: Right, we’re recording this in 2022 (for better or for worse), and a lot of what you’re saying sounds like it comes straight from a schoolboard hearing today. What lessons did publishers take from the brouhaha in California over Land of the Free?

JM: Well, publishers were in a tight spot, trying to appease both citizens pushing for more inclusive history in textbooks, while still trying to be able to sell those books in places like Texas.

So, ultimately, while California adopted Land of the Free, publishers began watering content down in the 70s and 80s. The battle over Land of the Free is one of the factors that led to textbooks becoming really boring, again lacking a strong meta-narrative for synthesizing US history. As my students remind me, most history textbooks remain boring today.

Ben: Frances Fitzgerald, the author of America Revised, another book on textbook history, calls this “the lowest common denominator” of history, which as you're saying is pretty unengaging. 

When you look at battles going on today over textbooks and attempts to ban the new bogeyman, Critical Race Theory, do conflicts over books seem like extensions of things that have occurred for a long time? Does that make you want to bang your head on a chalkboard? Or are the issues today different today than in the past?

JM:  You know, my hunch is that textbooks hold less and less influence every year, but clearly they've endured as political objects revealing what divides us as a nation.

So, yes, in many ways, debates are the same. This country is clearly still disentangling its relationship with race. At the same time, there are new flavors to the arguments. For example, questions about LGBTQ rights and the representation of the LGBTQ community in textbooks didn't come up in the 1960s, at least that I found, and it’s quite contentious now. Of course, that’s sort of a variation on a discriminatory theme as opposed to something radically new.

But no, I’m not banging my head on the chalkboard. Yes, as a citizen, I’m worried about our democracy, but I’m encouraged by my students. I learn a lot just by seeing how they react to looking at history and watching them try to integrate it into their own lives. I see them engaged and thoughtful and wrestling with these issues in a good way.

Ben: Related, I guess this is a good time to plug/point out that you now exclusively present your curriculum through TikTok videos, is that right? 

JM: Uh, yes, entirely. TikTok... right.

Ben: Either way, thank you for your work as a teacher, and for being here. It's been a pleasure.

JM: It was great to chat with you.

Interested in learning more? Check out our three-part video series, which includes an exploration of how Christian conservatives influence history curricula today. Here’s the first part, featuring a terracotta figurine: