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…

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…

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…

This article explores Alexander von Humboldt's influence on the education of young women in early nineteenth-century America. In the past decade, the English-speaking world has seen a resurgence of interest in Alexander von Humboldt. To date however, scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Humboldt's influence on American education,…

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, 1861-1876, formerly enslaved men and women demanded access to education. Aided by northern white missionaries, free blacks and some southern whites, freed men and women throughout the American South built schoolhouses, hired teachers and purchased textbooks. Some of these textbooks were…

In this article I discuss an investigation of handwritten mathematics manuscripts known as navigation cyphering books. These manuscripts, which were prepared during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are evidence of an educational tradition that was the primary means by which students in North America learned mathematics between 1607 and…

How have U.S. high school textbook depictions of World War II and Vietnam changed since the 1970s? We examined 102 textbooks published from 1970 to 2009 to see how they treated U.S. involvement in World War II and Vietnam. Our content analysis of high school history textbooks finds that U.S. textbooks increasingly focus on the personal experiences…

In the high school history textbooks children read, too often they find that labor's role in American history--and labor's important accomplishments, which changed American life--are misrepresented, downplayed, or ignored. That is a tragedy because labor played (and continues to play) a key role in the development of American democracy and the…

This article reexamines texts published during the period of the initial formation of the nation, from 1783 to 1815, or from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. This examination of thirty-one textbooks (sixteen geographies and history texts, and fifteen readers and grammar books), most written by New Englanders but also…

Historians work in a discipline with few inherent concepts and are obliged to draw upon many fields in recreating the past. Yet authors of most school history texts, state and national standards and curriculum materials seldom incorporate economic analysis in their work. Just look at state standards that include Adam Smith and John Locke but draw…

Reviews the treatment of 15 different, often unrelated topics and eras, as found in the first volumes of 19 widely-used U.S. history survey textbooks. Topics reviewed include Jamestown, American slavery, the Constitution, and Fort Sumter. The review focuses on factual errors, questionable interpretations, boring prose, and the question of…

The history of education is made up in part of accounts of various subjects which have developed into courses of study. Mathematics of some kind has always been included in such courses. In the American colonies, arithmetic was an important subject for practical reasons. It was needed for trade and commerce. Sailing vessels plying between Europe…

Presents an annotated bibliography of Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) resources related to the history of the United States Supreme Court. Materials selected include books, academic journals, theme issues, workbooks, and curriculum guides. Includes information on locating, ordering, and reproducing these resources. Also provides…