History News Network: Time to De-Confederatize the Textbook, "The American Journey"

[inanna]

Jul 31, 2015 10:46 am
by James W Loewen

An Open Letter to James McPherson

...

Let me start with the exact opposite of criticism. Decades ago, I bought your one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, in hardbound. It is my "go to" book on the war — indeed, for years I have filed all my other general histories of the war next to it, under "McPher," no matter who wrote them. That way I don't have to remember those other authors' names; I just remember yours.

About secession and the Confederacy, you said at Politics & Prose as well as in Battle Cry that the Southern states seceded over slavery and its extension, not for states' rights. I didn't take notes in the bookstore, but in Battle Cry (p. 214) you write:

The Alabama Democratic convention instructed its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could 'impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories....'

<snip>

In your textbook, however, which has shaped the views of secession, the Confederacy, and the Civil War of millions of middle-school children, you tell quite a different story. The American Journey is perhaps the largest single book ever inflicted upon a middle-school child. I included it as one of six new textbooks I reviewed for the second and current edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, even though it is intended for middle school rather than high school, because of the prominence of its authors: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and you.[3] Your names are on the cover and on the title page.

cont'd...

Link: http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153655

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

1. Textbooks are big business, and we know what side of the political spectrum big business favors.

So much RW BS spoon fed to students, and it seems to be getting worse.