This is despite what the seceding Texas state government wrote in 1861 at https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html :
Anyone else read “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James W Loewen? Texas has been revising history for a while.
Im surprised this isnt getting more play. It affects many other states. In the publishing world, volume matters. Texas, and California are the largest purchasers of textbooks, so when they decided to “rewrite” history, it becomes the standard and other states get the same textbooks.
I did read that about the textbooks.
Some schools are using an open source format for curriculum, perhaps that will work better than paying for textbooks that are outdated before they are recieved.
Big deal, school history is full of propaganda and lies.
You can’t teach stupid.
Yes, the Civil War was fought over “states rights.” Unfortunately the chief right those states were fighting for was the right of certain people to own certain other people as property. Revisionist textbooks are not going to change that fact.
There were other disagreements back then, but if there hadn’t been any slavery there wouldn’t have been any war.
I am an AP US History teacher (in a northern state 
) but we have a large employer in my district which has offices below the Mason Dixon (not Texas), and therefore I have ended up with a fair number of kids raised in the South in my class. I have noticed a number of differences over the years, some simple- and some genuinely revisionist. It can make for some lively class discussion!
I learned that slavery was a “side issue” when I went to school in New York State a couple of decades ago.
This is an interesting brochure from the National Park Service that explains the causes of the Civil War:
http://www.nps.gov/fosu/learn/historyculture/upload/SLAVERY-BROCHURE.pdf
@partyof5 raises a very important point.
I’ve done some freelance textbook writing-- I’m a math teacher.
One major company in particular comes to mind. They wanted thee sets of examples and pictures: One that would appeal to CA (pictures of the Golden Gate bridge) one that would appeal to Texas, and one that would appeal to the rest of the country. Yes, even for a math book.
Here’s a good explanation of the reasoning: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/
It’s only slightly offensive that the Yankees, as victors, haven’t done a better job at dictating how this will be taught. Don’t we learn in history that the victors get to make the decisions post conflict?
Not necessarily- look at our portrayal of Vietnam in textbooks etc- and we weren’t victors there…
It wasn’t all that long ago that some textbooks depicted enslaved Africans in the southern states as singing happily as they toiled in the cotton fields. I read that very depiction myself in a book in my very northern high school, a few years after the MLK assassination.
I would like to think that 100+ years after the Civil War, it’s no longer about “victors” deciding anything.
Exactly. As a Northerner, I don’t think of myself as “the side that won the Civil War” any more than I think of myself as “the side who dropped the bomb” in interacting with my Japanese clients and colleagues. Welcome to the 20th century. Maybe even try the 21st one of these days.
What a bunch of losers who can’t let go of the fact that they lost a war that was fought over a dishonorable premise in the first place.
I missed where we surrendered to Vietnam. I might have even missed where we declared war in the first place.
Maybe you could just show us where VIetnam has dictated the content of the textbooks.
I think the point about Vietnam in textbooks isn’t that the Vietnamese government is writing curriculum as much as those who were anti-Vietnamese conflict protestors are now writing the curriculum. It is taught that it was an unjust invasion of American forces into something that was not our business- a notion that many who supported the conflict at the time would take issue with. If we had been successful in Vietnam, the books might read differently today about whether it was a noble cause.
I know that when I was in school, the textbooks acknowledged that some of the founding fathers were slave owners but tried to gloss over it with “but see how nice they were to free their slaves in their wills.” I think the books have evolved on that topic since then. Rewriting history is not new or limited to Texas.
What is ironic about this whole mess is that my own kids go to school in Texas and our district does not buy many new textbooks. Our teachers are relying less and less on textbooks because they don’t find assigning a chapter and then lecturing on it to be very meaningful in terms of mastering a topic. It would be a shame in a few people in Texas are dictating content for the rest of the country and other states are using the books which Texas kids do not even use.
I think the most accurate way to describe who was fighting for what in the Civil War is this:
The South was fighting to keep slaves. The North was fighting to preserve the Union.
It was unjust, none of your business, and you lost.