Slavery, Market Censorship, and US Antebellum Schoolbook Publishing (original) (raw)
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Examining the Representation of Slavery within Children’s Literature
Social Studies Research and Practice, 2014
Middle level teachers, at times, link historical content with relevant English literature in interdisciplinary units. Elementary teachers periodically employ history-themed literature during reading time. Interconnections between language arts and history are formed with developmentally appropriate literature for students. Historical misrepresentations, however, proliferate in children's literature and are concealed behind engaging narratives. Since literacy and historical thinking are essential skills, children's literature should be balanced within, not banished from, the classroom. Using America's peculiar institution of slavery as a reference point, this article examines children's literature, identifies almost a dozen areas of historical misrepresentation, and proffers rich primary source material to balance the various misrepresentations. We provide teachers with reason for caution when including such literature; but also model how to locate, use, and, at times, abridge primary source material within an elementary or middle level classroom. Such curricular supplements provide balance to engaging but historically-blemished children's literature and enable educators to attain the rigorous prescriptions of Common Core.
Journal of Social Studies Research, 2020
In the decades after the Civil War, Southerners wrote and published their own history textbooks for secondary schools. These "mint julep textbooks," as the Southern all-white editions were called by the 1960s, reinforced a Lost Cause narrative of the war for Southern audiences while competing with Northern versions of events. In this study, we employ both historical narrative and content analysis of six textbooks' portrayals of John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The textbooks that are comparedthree Southern and three Northernwere written from the 1870s through the 1910s. While subtle but important differences emerge between the Northern and Southern depiction of these three figures, an even more important trend developed when analyzing change over time. In this article we conclude that, as time progressed, Southern versions of events increasingly impacted Northern textbooks. By the 1930s, the mint julep version of these three figures became the national consensus, as reflected in the work of historian David Saville Muzzey. This consensus around events like the raid at Harpers Ferry, the assassination of Lincoln, and the massacre at Fort Pillow lasted for much of the 20th century. By the early 20th century, Northerners appeased Southern interests in the writing of history textbooks.
American Literature, 2019
This essay takes the critical reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Frederick Douglass' Paper as an occasion to rethink modern constructions of critical authority while arguing for a print culture approach to literary criticism. Although scholars of antebellum culture typically focus on critical responses that are most readable by twenty-first-century standards (lengthy, signed reviews by readily identifiable critics in prestigious journals), paradoxically the less authoritative liminal critical forms (unsigned, unoriginal criticism circulated as reprinted reviews) displayed the centrality of criticism to nineteenth-century social and political life in the United States. Drawing on an expanded archive of eclectic critical forms, this essay denatural-izes and expands our sense of antebellum critical culture, examining the ways Frederick Dou-glass exploited the material diversity of contemporary print culture as part of his antislavery strategy, reprinting responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in an array of nontraditional critical forms to achieve pragmatic political goals. In so doing, Douglass transformed literary criticism from evaluation and entertainment into a powerful weapon in the war against slavery and the promotion of the interests of African Americans, applications that reaffirm the essay's claim for the importance of a material approach to critical culture. InJul y 1852 editor, orator, abolitionist, and former slave Frederick Douglass included within the pages of Frederick Dou-glass' Paper an account of a recent three-day trip to Ithaca, New York. In recounting the details of his tour, Douglass paused to express his astonishment at the "pleasing change in the public opinion of the place" in its stance toward slaver y since his last visit ten years earlier. He observed that while the Fugitive Slave Act and the cumulative effect of antislavery lecturers and papers must be held partly
Journal of Children's Literature, 2016
When selecting and evaluating historical children's literature, there are many questions that must be considered. For example, who will be reading the book? Is the imagined young reader of these historical stories a White, middle class cisgender heterosexual, able-bodied student who was born in the United States, or are child readers from all backgrounds being kept in mind. What kind of story is being told in the book? What makes the story difficult? Who is it difficult for? Does the nature of that difficulty differ depending on the demographic makeup of a classroom, school or community? None of these questions are new. Because problematic depictions of children continue to be published, reading and English language arts teachers in classrooms all over the United States, as well as the literacy educators who prepare them, must critically consider these questions as they select books for their students. As children read historical fiction, they are also learning about our nation's fraught past. Many historical topics found in children's and young adult literature--slavery, conditions in the Jim Crow South, the Japanese internment camps of World War II, and the genocide of Native Americans, to name just a few--are set amid the incomprehensible horrors of the bleakest chapters of American history. As literary critic Clare Bradford (2007) noted, one of the functions of children's literature is "to explain and interpret national histories--histories that involve invasion, conquest, violence, and assimilation" (p. 97). Addressing these fraught events, however, can prove difficult in light of some of the other functions of children's literature in our culture: to transmit values, to convey a sense of nostalgia and wonder, to spark young imaginations, or to provide an expected "happily ever after" at the end of each story. Racial issues raised during studying literature can cause considerable discomfort to both teachers and students. This is especially true of African American children's literature. Therefore, the authors of this article recommend that even when using award winning African American children's literature about slavery, recent research recommendations for learning and teaching African American children's literature should be consulted prior to approaching units on slavery. The authors offer a 5-point criteria by Rudine Sims Bishop for helping teachers, parents, and community members choose appropriate books depicting slavery. The 5 principles provided here for selecting authentic children's literature about slavery have the potential to expand the depiction of the lives of the enslaved beyond bondage. Using Bishop's framework to evaluate "A Fine Dessert," this article provides a recommended list of children's books that depict enslaved characters that are within the literary tradition that Bishop delineated.
‘My Massa Whip Me, Cos I love You’: Violence towards Slaves in Antebellum Southern Literature
It was no secret, even to contemporaneous observers, that the antebellum South was a violent place. Many Northern and international detractors all condemned the institution of slavery, both for its acts of aggression towards slaves and the hardness it instilled in the hearts of its perpetrators. But while figures such as Charles Dickens, William Lloyd Garrison and Sarah Moore Grimke condemned the institution, how was the violence inherent in slavery represented in the popular literature actually read by antebellum Southerners? Through consideration of novels by successful Southern authors of the pre-war period such as William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers, this paper will explore the ways in which Southern authors represent the violence that subtended the entire plantation economy. Firstly, it will note the tendency amongst some authors to use conventions of minstrelsy in depicting violence towards slaves as comedic, usually relying on depictions of bumbling black characters in grotesque slapstick. Secondly, it will note a perhaps more sinister approach, in which texts that seek to represent slavery as no great ill and something which should be tolerated marginalise the violence of the institution. Finally, the paper attempts to show how the contemporary reader can read closely and see through this political smokescreen, finding resonances of violence even in places where literary propagandists might try to obscure them.
American Antislavery Literature
Études Anglaises, 2017
This essay examines the evolution of American antislavery literature. It shows that arguments against slavery had been circulating in the colonies since the end of the 17th century. Between 1688 and 1865, there were thousands of separately published titles, including works in every genre, from poems and novels, to slave narratives and children's books. The essay argues as well that for all their historical importance, many antislavery writings also have interest in their own as works of literature. Looking at the history and the evolution of these writings the essay shows how a first, primarily religious type of writing was replaced, after 1775, by a more secular, more literary and more nationalistic mode of writing, followed by a great surge in antislavery writing after 1820, with poetry or slave narratives assuming increasing importance during the years 1820 to 1850. And it is antislavery writing in all its forms and media which conditioned many Americans to view slavery as the essential issue at stake in the war that ensued. The essay concludes on the fact that the continued need for antislavery writing speaks to a painful truth: it was not slavery that was extraordinary, but rather the idea of freedom as the natural condition and universal right of mankind that marked a revolutionary turn.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton’s 2006 book, Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, presents a selection of essays dealing with the intersection of public history and the history of American slavery. The book’s thesis is simply that, “the history of slavery continues to have meaning in the twentieth century-it burdens all of American history and is incorporated into interpretations of the past.”1 The book uses ten essays which deal with public history of slavery in America to illustrate the issue’s continuing importance in the interpretation of the country’s past. “Alone and together, these essays address several themes; they describe how the public presentation of U.S. history has traditionally minimized the role plays by African Americans and slavery.”
Lost Cause Textbooks: Civil War Education in the South from the 1890s to the 1920s
2018
This thesis analyzes the origins, creation and implementation of Lost Cause history textbooks in the South in the decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction. Directed by secondary source material relating to the topic, primary source materials—magazines, newspapers, board minutes, etc.— were explored to find evidence for the motives of rewriting a history of the Civil War more favorable to the former Confederate states. These motives included the positive reflection of former Confederates by future generations of white Southerners and the advancement of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Several textbooks from both northern and southern authors, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were compared differentiate the Lost Cause narrative of the war from that of the victorious North. The Lost Cause narrative in these history textbooks promoted the following: the constitutionality of southern secession, the benevolence of the institution of slavery, the...