Following the American Civil War, several school music series were published to serve the needs of graded schools. These gradually became more popular than the single-volume songbooks previously used in public schools. Yet, school songbooks by Ransom Hubbard Randall and other authors continued to be used in the public schools as late as the 1920s.…

Immersion into fiction is associated with many educational and social benefits. The current study compared read-alouds of a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction textbook to determine whether differences were observed in student's transportation, content learning, and socio-emotional development. In all, 41 students between the ages of 9 and…

History textbooks are less likely to be complete renderings of the truth than a series of stories textbook authors (and the many stakeholders who influence them) consider beneficial. Sam Wineburg describes how the process of writing history textbooks often leads to sanitized and inaccurate versions of history. As an example, he describes how the…

Multiple racial issues in America have been brought to the forefront by the recent deaths of African Americans, yet many teachers feel unprepared to engage with students around issues of race. Their discomfort is likely because traditional textbooks omitted the experiences of non-dominant, marginalized groups, thereby denying readers an…

This paper explores the representation and non-representation of slavery in US school textbooks from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the US Civil War. It reviews the major readers, almost none of which mentioned slavery despite the anti-slavery sentiments of many textbook editors. The few readers that addressed slavery did so in…

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, people immediately compared the attack with the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years prior. In this article, we explore how US and world history textbooks published shortly after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 depicted and contextualized both events. The textbooks…

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the…

This article examines the presentation of caste systems of stratification in U.S. introductory sociology textbooks. First, the "caste versus class" debate from the 1930s and 1940s is summarized and its competing perspectives are evaluated. Second, after an in-depth analysis of introductory sociology textbooks presenting material on the…

Years ago, it became established that the severity and length of the Great Depression were due largely to misguided Federal Reserve monetary policy and the resulting catastrophic bank failures. This result is confirmed by surveys of scholars in the area and books specifically written on economic history. Yet the leading textbooks used in high…

The study in this report focuses on four historical periods and five textbooks. The four historical periods are: (1) The European Settlement of North America (1492-1660); (2) Colonial America (1660-1763); (3) The Nation's Founding (1763-1789); and (4) The New Deal (1933-1940). Three of the 5 textbooks are intended for regular high school American…

In 1752, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin supposedly flew a kite near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to confirm that lightning had the same properties of common electricity that electrical machines produced and Leyden jars served to store. Illustrations, vignettes and paintings frequently portray the famous experiment, showing…

In fall 2022, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy (the Institute) and UnidosUS, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the country, designed a project to better understand the representation of Latinos in U.S. History textbooks for high school. Recent years have brought increased awareness that students learn best when they…

This article focuses on ten U.S. history textbooks, all in common use across the nation. This study adopts a historical narrative analysis, which aims to determine the manner in which textbook narratives may promote "de facto national mandates." This method allows for the comparison of textbook narratives to historical works, looking for…

The authors analyzed three Advanced Placement U.S. History textbooks' narratives of U.S. 20th century social democratic policies (e.g. New Deal, G.I. Bill, pro-suburbanization policies) using Lipsitz's "possessive investment in whiteness" as a theoretical framework. The authors found texts portrayed the exclusion of Black populations…

Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but U.S. public discourse around the issue remains mired in controversy, including in education. Our study leverages natural language processing methods to give a precise look into the extent to which climate change-related topics are covered in 30 of the most widely used high school history…