About midway through my reporting process, I spent an afternoon at the New York Public Library. There I reviewed American history textbooks from the 1950s and 1960s. Their racism in depicting African-Americans, Chinese immigrants and Mexican-Americans was overt, a reminder of the vastly different history educations received by today's adults-- all of whom, from Generation Z to the Greatest Generation, will be eligible to vote in November 2020.COMMENT
It was a reminder that the historical stories we tell have a profound impact on the world.
This article describes the research process for a newspaper article about differences in history textbooks used in Texas and California.
At the library the author consults out-of-date textbooks, a kind of material that many librarians would weed without a second thought, particularly since they promote a kind of overt racism that would be entirely inappropriate in the contemporary classroom. However, the books are valuable precisely because they demonstrate pedagogical history and changing attitudes. The writer believes that knowledge of history informs voting and civic engagement, with the implication that the racism taught in the classrooms of the past may have created a cohort of racist voters. If we threw those outdated books away it would be hard to remember how kids learned history so many decades ago.
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