Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

Harvard historian Yacovone (coauthor, The African Americans) delivers a monumental assessment of “how slavery, race, abolitionism and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught in our nation’s K-12 schoolbooks” from the 1830s to the present. Spotlighting writers, publishers, and educators including John H. Van Evrie, “the nation’s first professional racist,” whose 1866 textbook A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the United States, from 1861 to 1865 “guarantee[d] that future generations would cherish white supremacy as the nation’s governing principle,” and Roscoe Conkling Bruce, the assistant superintendent of education for Washington, D.C.’s “colored schools” in the early 20th century, Yacovone documents the uphill battle to create history texts that accurately reflected the experiences of African Americans. In the decades before the Civil War, most textbooks avoided any detailed discussion of slavery; when mentioned, it was only as a source of political tensions between the states. Black narratives emerged in educational materials during Reconstruction, but were soon replaced by deeply flawed histories that promoted racist stereotypes and “categorically repudiated any version of slavery that stressed harsh or unjust conditions.” Yacovone’s survey is expansive and eye-opening, revealing that the problem was a national phenomenon—he calls out Northern authors for endorsing Lost Cause mythology and racist theories about the “supposedly gross incapacities of African Americans”—that greatly influenced the country’s political discourse. This troubling and powerful history is essential reading. Illus. (Sept.)