American history books7/31/2023 The Daughters of the Confederacy, famed for its promotion of the Lost Cause and segregation-well, guess what? Whom did they reprint? John H. I was actually stunned when I discovered that the first expression of Lost Cause ideology didn’t even come out of the South it came out of the North. Over 90% of the authors who wrote these textbooks were northern-born or certainly northern trained at northern universities.Ī lot of people believe the Lost Cause narrative-the myth that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights not slavery-came from the South, but your book shows that publishing houses in the North put out a lot of books about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Those cities dominated the distribution system. The publishing industry grew up in Boston, New York, and then a little later, in Chicago. A majority of Americans live outside the South, not in the South. It’s not a southern creation it’s a white northern creation. The central one would be northern responsibility for the creation of white supremacy. What myths did you set out to debunk with this book? Read more: A New Report Finds That 45 States Are ‘Failing’ to Teach Students About Reconstruction The textbooks that I read bore out everything he argued. He was designed by God and nature to do the white man’s work. His major theme was the necessity of having the African in American society because he was, according to Van Evrie, born to do the white man’s work. He created a small empire in Manhattan, where he published his own books, innumerable pamphlets, poetry, and two newspapers, which reached thousands of people. In one year alone, he ran advertisements in 1,400 different American newspapers. Van Evrie, often called “the nation’s first professional racist.” Why did you focus on him in your book?Īfter I had gone through white supremacist attitudes in all of these textbooks, I said, where does it come from? I spent a whole summer reading digitized newspapers and found references to Van Evrie all over the country. You feature a 19th-century New York editor named John H. This year we have outdone ourselves51 categories, including some you would never expect, highlighting more than 130 exceptional books. They spent far more time discussing the introduction of single women to become wives of white settlers than they did on the introduction of slavery. The Best History Books to Understand the Present Our list of The Best Books of 2023 (So Far) features superlative titles across genres that have published within the first half of 2023. Almost all of these textbooks spent maybe two sentences on the introduction of slavery in Virginia in 1619. These books didn’t consider people of African descent to be important, so they just weren’t included. In the pre-Civil War era, one is struck by how few images of African Americans there are in textbooks. Douglas, Dorothea Dix, Eli Whitney, Harriet Tubman, and more. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Stephen A. This becomes the overwhelming theme of almost every single textbook from 1900 until the 1960s. Learn about important people of the American Civil War such as Ulysses S. Textbooks in the early 20th century said Reconstruction was a gross error, that it tried to elevate Black people who did not have the intellectual ability to govern, to participate in society. How did these textbooks distort facts about historical events? Read more: African-American History Finally Gets Its Own AP Class It’s a study of national identity because the purpose of textbooks is to acculturate younger people into American ideals, American destiny, and what is valued and honored by Americans.” And what these books were saying well into the 1960s was that it’s a white man’s world. After going through this whole collection, I thought, “Wow. Choose your poison: general historical nonfiction, historical biographies, historical memoirs, microhistories, historical graphic novels, or even historical true crime.The overwhelming majority of them treated the introduction of African Americans in American society as a “problem.” The further you go into the 20th century, this almost Evangelical theme of “the problem of a Negro” and how much he needed to be controlled because he was so inept and ignorant became the guiding theme of American history textbooks. But I’ve divided them into categories to make it even easier to find your next favorite historical nonfiction read. The following books are some of the best books in the genre. In fact, these historical nonfiction books are even harder to put down, because all of this stuff really happened. These stories are well researched, thought provoking, and are just as riveting as fiction. Historical nonfiction is so much more than the history books you read in school. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (She can be reached at All posts by Emily Martin Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor.
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