This thesis examines the Confederate textbook campaign, including the motives of authors and publishers, and analyzes the content of the textbooks themselves, including such themes as patriotism, gender roles, war, and death. An incredible story, as well as excellent historical detailing and insight into the eastern theatre of the war in Virginia. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. One postwar author was none other than Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, whose portrayal of the war sounds remarkably like the version you hear from many Southerners and political conservatives today: it was a noble but doomed effort on the part of the South to preserve self-government against federal intrusion, and it had little to do with slavery. In the process, the real causes of the war were swept under the rug, the better to facilitate economic partnerships and sentimental reunions of Civil War veterans. Still, the revisionist campaign of Confederate sympathizers gained traction. In this way, the historiography of the Civil War is somewhat unique. believed they were fighting for the democratic principle of freedom to manage their own affairs, just as the thirteen colonies had fought in the Revolutionary War.” The same textbook describes the Ku Klux Klan as a group that “sometimes” resorted to violence in its effort to retake local governments from the hands of incompetent former slaves. “No respected historian has argued for decades that the Civil War was fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were mere hypocrites, or that only constitutional concerns drove secessionists,” writes University of Virginia historian Edward Ayers. The problem today, the former publishing executive told me, is that “with so many state standards, the books have become in the last ten years longer, blander, more visual, certainly—and more inclusive. Copyright © 2021 Salon.com, LLC. Aided by northern white missionaries, free blacks and some southern whites, freed men and women throughout the American South built schoolhouses, hired teachers and purchased textbooks. Discover the best U.S. Civil War History in Best Sellers. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. The first federal agency devoted to education was authorized by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1867, and Congress passed several laws in the 1870s aimed at establishing a national education system. “Amazing. Matthew Gallman, Matthew C. Hulbert, James Marten, and Amy Murrell Taylor—for their opinions on a variety of popular topics, including the war's most overrated and underratred commanders, top turning points, most influential women, and best depictions on film. Where did the idea that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery” come from? Nobody goes to war for a moral reason like that. In a Pew study done in 2011, 48% of people surveyed believed the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” compared to only 38% who said it was fought “mainly over slavery.”. To call it a Civil War was to concede that secession was impossible and/or unconstitutional—something no self-respecting Southerner should ever do. Among other things, "The Truths of History" asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a mediocre intellect, that the South’s interest in expanding slavery to Western states was its benevolent desire to acquire territory for the slaves it planned to free, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a peaceful group whose only goal was maintaining public order. One hundred and fifty years after the event, Americans—at least the vast majority who toil outside academia—still can’t agree. But the UDC’s most important and lasting contribution was in shaping the public perceptions of the war, an effort that was begun shortly after the war by a Confederate veterans’ group called the United Confederate Veterans (which later became the Sons of Confederate Veterans—also still around, and thirty thousand members strong). And the textbooks they wrote, remained in southern classrooms until the late 70s and the women's group did it all without the right to vote or participate in politics, You can still get glimmers of this lost cause memory of the war from people who will always choose to see it through the personal and I think the U DC to a great extent was that was their goal. Rarely in human history has a conflict’s losing side been lent such considerable say in how the textbooks remember it. by Peter Leo Johnson (page images at HathiTrust) A Short History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Belford Co., 1890), by Jefferson Davis. How they lived and talked, and what they did and suffered, while fighting for the flag . Reid Mitchell. White non-Southerners believed this in roughly the same proportion as white Southerners, which was interesting; even more fascinating was the fact that 39 percent of the black respondents, many of them presumably the descendants of slaves, did, too. A Confederate Catechism: 07. If all of this wasn’t enough to stifle all public debate and intellectual inquiry in the decades after the war, other prevailing conditions might have finished the job: the widespread poverty of those decades, the rise of Jim Crow and the need to maintain the belief in white supremacy, a pervasive religious mindset that put a higher value on faith than on reason. For years, textbook authors have contended that economic difference between North and South was the primary cause of the Civil War. While similar to antebellum textbooks in many respects, Confederate textbooks portrayed slavery as central to Southern society and offered explicit defenses of the institution. Topic: United States -- History Civil War, 1861-1865. The United Daughters of the Confederacy altered the South's memory of the Civil War.Subscribe to our channel! Confederate sympathizers have long understood the importance of getting the Civil War wrong. … Lost Cause Textbooks: Civil War Education in the South from the 1890s to the 1920s (Under the direction of John Neff) 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. It’s no wonder that the so-called Southern renaissance of the 1930s happened outside academia, in the field of fiction; as Cobb points out, the people least interested in understanding Southern history at that time were Southern historians, and Blight agrees. Enduring names Civil War. Author of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' claims American textbooks have been lying about the Civil War. Among white Southerners, rich or poor, the universally accepted history was the version that would later find fame in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel "Gone With the Wind"—a book that sold millions, was translated into twenty-seven languages, and has probably had a more lasting influence on public perceptions about the South to this day than any other single work. ------------------------------------------. The UDC industriously compiled lists of textbooks used in schools across the South, sorting them into one of three categories: texts written by Northerners and blatantly unfair to the South; texts that were “apparently fair” but were still suspect because they were written by Northerners; and works by Southern writers. Robert Gleed was only 17 when, a few years before the start of the Civil War, he escaped from a Virginia slave owner. One reason boils down to simple convenience—for white people, that is. The northern economy relied on manufacturing and the agricultural southern economy depended on the production of cotton. In the United States, "Civil War" is the most common term for the conflict and has been used by the overwhelming majority of reference books, scholarly journals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, popular histories, and mass media in the United States since the early 20th century. Later, as the veteran population aged, the UDC built homes that allowed indigent veterans and their widows to live out their days with some measure of dignity. Cobb recounts how in 1911, for instance, University of Florida history professor Enoch Banks wrote an essay for the New York Independent suggesting that slavery was the cause of secession; Banks was forced by the ensuing public outcry to resign. 1890 1890. by Snyder, Ann E. Mrs. texts. The report, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, traces racial tensions and even debates about what, exactly, racism is in America to the failure of schools to teach the full impact that slavery has had on all Americans. Long before there was such a thing as the National Park Service, the UDC played a crucial role in preserving priceless historic sites, war cemeteries, and battlefields across the South. In Louisiana, students are not taught Civil War history in high school. In 1913, for instance, the sons of confederate Veterans succeeded in banning from the University of Texas history curriculum a book that they felt offered an excessively New England slant on recent history. Claude Sitton, another Southerner who covered the civil rights movement for the New York Times, remembers participating in a yearly essay contest sponsored by the UDC when he was a high school student in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the early 1950s. The Southern slave owners would argue that they were fighting to keep states’ rights, meaning they were dependent on a slave economy, and believed they had the right to keep their livelihood, as they knew it. “As late as the 1970s, neither textbooks nor curricula veered far from lost cause interpretations, especially in the Deep South,” writes historian Karen L. Cox—and in his book on the civil rights era in Mississippi, historian John Dittmer concluded that the lost cause version of post-Civil War reconstruction in the South still held sway among the vast majority of whites in that state as recently as the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the books on this list are, indeed, my all-time favorites — cherished works that have informed and inspired me, sometimes leaving me awestruck. 680,000 to 800,000 men died. In the United States, "Civil War" is the most common term for the conflict and has been used by the overwhelming majority of reference books, scholarly journals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, popular histories, and mass media in the United States since the early 20th century. In most textbooks, slavery is only a dot on a timeline. As the UDC gained in political clout, its members lobbied legislatures in Texas, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Florida to ban the purchase of textbooks that portrayed the South in anything less than heroic terms, or that contradicted any of the lost cause’s basic assertions. A Southside View of Slavery: 05. Some features of this site may not work without it. The Southern slave owners would argue that they were fighting to keep states’ rights, meaning they were dependent on a slave economy, and believed they had the right to keep their livelihood, as they knew it. That narrative has a few basic tenets the glorification of … Facts and Falsehoods Concerning the War on the South 1861-65: 04. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. Before the Civil War, education was strictly a private and/or local affair. The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (2003), a statistical study of 732 Scalawags and 666 Redeemers. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Park Service—under pressure from the academic community and a few members of Congress—made it a priority to revamp its exhibits to “interpret [the Civil War] and the causes of the war based on current scholarship,” said Dwight Pitcaithley, a professor of history at New Mexico State University who was chief historian of the Park Service from 1995 to 2005. Publishers don’t offer a special “Southern” version of history anymore; these days, they cater to individual state educational standards, though some states—like California and Texas—have a disproportionate national influence on what those standards are. Joe Glatthar, Jacquelyn D. Hall and Fitz Brundage cover a wide range of issues that connect to the Civil War. They also sought to promote Confederate nationalism among the new nation's youngest citizens and instructed children to honor and memorialize the Confederacy. To this day, it’s possible to stir up a hornet’s nest among ordinary Southerners by asserting that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War; at the least, it will earn a native Southerner the accusation of having signed over his brain to those Ivy League intellectual snobs who despise all things Southern. In an era when any assertion of “fact” is met by noisy counterassertions of competing “facts,” it’s hard to grasp how completely this warped version of history was accepted as gospel in the South, as silly to dispute as the law of gravity. Before the 1860s most of the South had only a rudimentary public school system. Emory has collected manuscripts, archives and rare books related to Southern history for nearly 100 years. American Civil War, four-year war (1861–65) fought between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded to form the Confederate States of America. I saw them dressed on Sunday in their Sunday best—far better dressed than English tenants of the working class are in their holiday attire.”, But presenting the “correct” version of history was only half the battle; the other half was preventing “incorrect” versions from ever infiltrating Southern schools. Its reach extended not just to public schools but to tenured academia—a little-known chapter of its propaganda effort is detailed by James Cobb in his 2005 book "Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity." The following year, Virginia school officials were chagrined to learn that one of their state-adopted textbooks was teaching fourth graders that thousands of loyal slaves took up arms for the confederacy. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. There’s so much to cover.” The result is like light beer: better tasting, less filling. Download Citation | On Jan 1, 2009, Laura Elizabeth Kopp published Teaching the Confederacy: Textbooks in the Civil War South | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate As it turns out, the textbook’s author took her information from the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ website; the error was discovered when a history professor at the College of William and Mary happened to come across it while browsing through a copy of one of her fourth grade daughter’s schoolbooks. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. And yet the argument persists, and not in small numbers. The UDC sounds like one of those genteel ladies’ organizations that would have quietly passed into oblivion about the time women ditched their girdles and entered the labor market, but they are still around—a group of about twenty thousand ladies dedicated to various educational and historical preservation causes. In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. Miss Milly’s burning passion was ensuring that Southern youngsters learned the “correct” version of what the war was all about and why it had happened—a version carefully vetted to exclude “lies” and “distortions” perpetrated by anti-Southern textbook authors. Du Bois was writing brilliantly about the black experience and reconstruction. Northerners and President Lincoln entered the war initially to keep the Union intact. I'm not a Southerner, but I really do think it's unfair how textbooks talk about the Civil War as if the North was fighting a moral war for slavery. Nobody goes to war for a moral reason like that. Richard F. Miller. Chuck Thompson Updated Apr. *You will get your 1st month of Bartleby for FREE when you bundle with these textbooks where solutions are available ($9.99 if … Copyright 2013 by Tracy Thompson. Outside academia, the New South creed, popularized by Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady in an effort to spur economic development, also reinforced this new orthodoxy. In December 2008, Pitcaithley gave a talk to public school educators in Mississippi, and used as part of his presentation this quote from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession: “Our cause is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world.” That sentence is now prominently displayed on the wall of the National Park Service visitors’ center in Corinth, Mississippi, near the site of the battle of Shiloh. Enduring names Civil War. In its way, the UDC groomed a generation of Southern women for participation in the political process: presidents attended its national convocations, and its voice was heard in the corridors of the U.S. Capitol. . Rice University has a strong concentration in Southern History, including John Boles who edits the Journal Of Southern History. By Coleman Lowndes Oct 25, 2017, 1:37pm EDT JavaScript is disabled for your browser. 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. How did this happen? “They pushed themselves to believe that,” he said. Evidence of this crops up all the time, often in the form of a legal dispute over a display of the Confederate flag. During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. Independence would allow Southerners to preserve their traditional way of life—a way of life that included slavery.” That’s a way of putting it even Miss Milly might have been able to live with. The Battle of Gettysburg The Civil war began on April 12th, 1861, only a month after Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States. I did not encounter the UDC essay contests when I was a student in public schools in the 1960s, but the things I heard from my mother could have come straight from Miss Milly’s approved textbooks. It’s an apt metaphor for what happened to any Southerner born before about 1970, and to a good many of those born since. It was this philosophy that propagated the fallacy that State’s Rights was the main cause for the Civil War. “I asked him if he’d ever seen that [quote] and he said no—he’d never even heard of that.”, All of which explains both how that dubious assertion that thousands of slaves fought in defense of the Confederacy came to be included in that Virginia textbook back in 2010, and how the error came to light. At the bottom of all of these is one basic question: was the Civil War about slavery, or states’ rights? For our latest newsstand-only special issue, The Civil War Almanac, we asked a panel of Civil War historians—J. I'm not a Southerner, but I really do think it's unfair how textbooks talk about the Civil War as if the North was fighting a moral war for slavery. Since 1955, the UDC has recruited next-generation members through a young persons’ auxiliary called the Children of the Confederacy, which does similar kinds of work. Perhaps Banks should have seen that coming: seven years earlier, William E. Dodd, a history professor at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, had complained that to merely suggest the confederacy might not have been a noble enterprise led by lofty-minded statesmen “is to invite not only criticism but enforced resignation.” Dodd himself would later migrate to the University of Chicago, where he established a Northern outpost for Southerners who were interested in a serious examination of Southern history. Retrouvez A General History of the Civil War: The Southern Point of View et des millions de livres en stock sur Amazon.fr. Although the field of Southern history underwent a revolution at the university level in the 1940s and 1950s, the version ordinary Southerners knew in 1970 and even later had not changed appreciably since 1900. “I grew up in a cocoon,” Herbers says today, recalling his childhood and the version of history he absorbed. In the early years of the twentieth century the main spokesperson for this point of view was a formidable Athens, Georgia, school principal named Mildred Lewis Rutherford (or Miss Milly, as she is known to UDC members), who traveled the South speaking, organizing essay contests, and soliciting oral histories of the war from veterans, seeking the vindication of the lost cause “with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of propaganda in any 20th century dictatorship,” Blight writes. New Texas textbooks whitewash Civil War history — and they pose a danger to schoolchildren all over the country The Washington Post 2015-07-07T01:59:57Z On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. The Rose Library's collections are particularly strong in the history of the American Civil War and the history of the civil rights and post-civil rights eras. How Textbooks Can Teach Different Versions Of History : NPR Ed About 5 million public school students in Texas this year will get new and controversial textbooks … For all but the rich and/or socially elite this was the South that H. L. Mencken lampooned as “a stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums”—far more concerned with the next meal than with intellectual inquiry. The significance of the UDC lies not in its present-day clout, which is negligible, but in its lasting contributions to history— both for good and for ill. From its inception in 1894 up through the 1960s, the UDC was the South’s premier social and philanthropic organization, an exclusive social club where the wives, sisters, and daughters of the South’s ruling white elite gathered to “revere the memory of those heroes in gray and to honor that unswerving devotion to principle which has made the confederate soldier the most majestic in history,” as cofounder Caroline Meriwether Goodlett grandly put it. There were more thoughtful voices, of course—in Atlanta, W. E. B. It not only broadens our understanding of the road to Civil War, but also illuminates issues of anti-Semitism … All rights reserved. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. Blum Edward J. and W. Scott Poole, eds. Yet, as Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, there was never any doubt that the billions of dollars in property represented by the South’s roughly four million slaves was somehow at the root of everything, and on this point scholars who don’t agree about much of anything else have long found common ground. With no space to truth-squad a 150-year-old public relations campaign, today’s texts simply strive not to offend; they don’t perpetrate the lost cause myth, but they don’t do much to correct it, either.