History repeating itself : the republication of children's historical literature and the Christian right / Gregory M. Pfitzer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfitzer, Gregory M., author.

Series:

Studies in print culture and the history of the book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historiography.

History publishing.

History.

United States--History--Textbooks.

United States.

History publishing--United States--History.

United States--Historiography.

Historiography--Religious aspects.

Genre:

Textbooks.

Physical Description:

xi, 309 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amherst ; Boston : University of Massachusetts Press, [2014]

Summary:

Recently publishers on the Christian right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's U.S. history books and marketing them to parents as "anchor texts" for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting on unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books. In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by placing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based in context, with fascinating and important stories about the publishers and authors who produced them. Pfitzer also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why contemporary curricular decisions are shaped by the "past we choose to remember" on behalf of our children. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: "the past we choose to remember"

Narrative history: Samuel Goodrich and truth in children's history

Pedagogical history: the Abbott brothers and Progressive approaches to the past

Gendered history: Josephine Pollard and monosyllabic histories

Providential history: Charles Carleton Coffin and the home study movement

Biographical history: Elbridge S. Brooks and the childhood lives of great men

Doctrinal history: Charles Morris and the search for "lost history"

Conclusion: the recycled past.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781625341242

1625341245

9781625341235

1625341237

OCLC:

880861085