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.

Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History publishing--United States--History.

History publishing.

Historiography--Religious aspects.

Historiography.

United States--History--Textbooks.

United States.

United States--Historiography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

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

Summary:

Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children'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 upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books. In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood. Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the "past we choose to remember" on behalf of our children.

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 index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-61376-344-1

OCLC:

933516763