The lack of understanding of most white Americans about the true role of the American Indian and other minority groups in American history is an outgrowth of the failure of the media in general, and history texts in particular, to realistically address minority/majority relations throughout U.S. history. Several suggestions to aid in public…

Savage, blood-thirsty, drunk, monosyllabic, naked, and primitive are the stereotypes of Native Americans in textbooks. These stereotypes are so pervasive that they tend to be accepted uncritically by the rest of society. The evidence suggests that many textbooks are biased and, in a large number of cases, outright racist. The concept of…

The STRIDE (Service, Training, and Research in Desegregated Education) program, designed to assist school districts in the process of desegregation, was established by the U.S. Office of Education under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During 1974-75, a series of regional conferences was held in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Topics of…

Noting that major publishers have begun to depict a more balanced portrayal of ethnic story characters and content in their basal reading series, a study was conducted to investigate the extent to which stories depicting the three largest ethnic groups in the United States were contained in nine of the major and current basal reading series…

Studies on the portrayal of minorities, older persons, and females in elementary and secondary school textbooks used in the 1970s are reviewed in this publication. The studies are divided into the following categories: American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Island Americans, religious groups, older persons, and females. In the…

Studies have shown that textbooks have treated the black person as invisible or as a problem and generally have failed to note that bigotry has been a fundamental American attitude since the arrival of Columbus. One might have thought that by 1973 publishing houses would have eliminated the need for this type of criticism, but this is not the…

This report of a study, undertaken at the request of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, details: 1) precedents and historical backgrounds in textbook analysis; 2) the methodology of the present study; and, 3) recommendations based on the findings. Groups selected for study were: Jews, immigrants, Moslems, Negroes, and American Indians. The…

Children's fiction written between 1945 and 1962 was analyzed for current stereotypes of minority Americans, and the results were compared with related studies of adult fiction and school textbooks. Two analytic instruments were applied to 114 minority characters selected from 42 children's books about American Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Negroes,…

Portrayal of racial minorities in textbooks is discussed and the practice of textbook publishers in their treatment of the roles of minorities during the 1960s to the present is traced. America transmits the dominant ideals and values of its culture to students through textbooks. Until the 1960s, racial minorities were generally ignored by writers…