This study employed a qualitative content analysis design to examine the extent to which 8th and 11th-grade U.S. History textbooks, adopted by the State of Texas, foster historical empathy and disciplinary knowledge and skills in the subject of history through student engagement with textbook activities. The textbook activities collected for this…

There is a lack of research on the prevalence of Latinas in K-12 history textbooks. This research offers a content analysis of the unique gendered contributions of Latinas in history to fulfill this gap in educational research. Twelve middle and high school textbooks were examined using content analysis to assess the extent of Latina inclusion in…

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

The United States and Brazil were the two largest slave societies in the history of New World slavery, and the legacies of that history remain salient in both nations. Slavery and the slave trade are important topics to be taught in history courses, and future generations need to be given accurate information about the history and legacies of…

Cutting-edge data science techniques can shed new light on fundamental questions in educational research. We apply techniques from natural language processing (lexicons, word embeddings, topic models) to 15 U.S. history textbooks widely used in Texas between 2015 and 2017, studying their depiction of historically marginalized groups. We find that…

Features of eighth-grade history textbooks were examined through replication of a 20-year-old study that investigated "considerateness" of textbooks. Considerate texts provide clear, coherent information and include features that promote students' comprehension, such as explicit use of organizational structures, a range of question types…

Every year, historians in the United States attend the American Historical Association (AHA), a conference that has met annually since 1884. The AHA draws scholars from all specializations, and it is the primary organization through which the profession is represented. In 1969, the conference met at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. At…

This article examines the history textbooks available in 1998 for adoption in the United States at both the high school and elementary levels. New books have appeared on the scene since the last textbook adoption series. California begins its textbook considerations in August. The California adoption will rekindle national interest in the content…

This documents consists of 12 issues of a journal that seeks to provide information and reviews concerning social studies textbooks; each issue consists of 16 pages. Contents in the 12 issues include: (1) California control over textbook content; (2) "skills" teaching in elementary-level social studies texts; (3) readability formulas;…