Actually, it is the other way around, since Texas’ size means that it influences textbooks used in many other places.
@rhandco, also, Southerners were told to take down the Confederate battle flag by fellow Southerners. Those with skin color of a blacker hue. Yet you did not take their opinions in to consideration. Why is that?
Sources I’ve read estimate that 40% of enslaved Africans reaching Britain’s North American colonies (excluding the Caribbean) were brought to Charleston and sold in that city’s slave markets. So yes, Charleston was the largest slave-importing port, but others were important, too, including Virginia’s tidewater ports and Annapolis. Smaller numbers of slaves were brought to Philadelphia and New York before those states abolished slavery by statute, Pennsylvania in 1780 and New York in 1799 (though both statutes effectively “grandfathered” already-enslaved people who remained slaves in Pennsylvania and became indentured servants for life–as best I can tell a nominal difference only–in New York). By the time the U.S. banned the international slave trade in 1808, South Carolina was the only state that still allowed international imports of slaves, though the motives of some of the Southern states in abolishing the international slave trade but not slavery itself were less than pure. The “Upper South” states of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina had large slave populations and found that selling slaves on the domestic market was a lucrative business, especially if the price was not undercut by cheap foreign imports. So they became, in effect, protectionists, propping up the price of slaves by eliminating foreign competition through a ban on the international slave trade. After the international trade was shut down, Richmond and New Orleans became the principal slave-trading centers. Because of its position as the railroad hub of the Upper South, Richmond became the principal domestic “exporter,” while New Orleans became the principal domestic “importer” of slaves for re-sale throughout the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Basin.
@bay:
No, it isn’t the bad ole north telling the south what to do. The problem with this is because Texas buys school books as a state, and they are so large, that textbook publishers change their books to be able to get bought in Texas, it is using the power of the marketplace to try and influence how history is taught. There are problems with the teaching of the civil war, there is no doubt, when I was growing up you would think that Lincoln was the great emancipator, that the north was full of abolitionists angry at the enslavement of blacks and a lot of other things that simply weren’t true, either partly or fully.
That said, what we have been seeing the last 35 years has been a push towards revisionism to be ‘fair and balanced’, that historically is more like Fox News than BBC news. Thus the civil war becomes more about “states rights” than slavery, it was the south fighting to ‘maintain their way of life’, and worse, now we have revionism that slavery wasn’t so bad, why, it was so pleasant that thousands of black soldiers fought for the south, which is utter, absolute BS (what that leaves out, of course, is that those soldiers were taken on late in the war, with promises that they would be freed, not exactly the ‘song of the south’ version of things, not to mention that the Union Army had 180,000 black soldiers,many of them escaped slaves, which doesn’t say much about slavery).
There were real issues between the North and South, issues of tariffs and not being able to sell goods to other markets, but the idea that it was not mostly about slavery is quite frankly a lie, and the states rights and maintaining our culture in truth boiled down to this issue. More importantly, it wasn’t about slavery being made illegal in the current slave states, what the south had been looking for in the decades before the civil war was the expansion of slavery, specifically into new territories. We were told that the Missouri compromise ended this issue, but by the time of the Civil war the south was not happy with those limitations and was pushing to ‘expand markets’, to allow pretty much unlimited expansion. Why? Because the most lucrative aspects of slavery were selling slaves into new markets. Once they banned the importation of slaves in 1808, the slave economy became based around ‘creating new product’, where basically a lot of wealth was being made buying and selling slaves, rather than the commodities being grown or produced (and if anyone wants to challenge me on this, pick up some of the books James MacPherson and others have written in recent decades). Issues like trade and tariffs were on the table the whole time, but time and again it came back to slavery, and not only that, but the expansion of it, and that in turn to a large extent was because the slave trade post 1808 was extremely lucrative, and slaveholders wanted those markets, pure and simple.
The other thing to keep in mind is that despite all the hue and cry about abolitionists, northern industrial interests weren’t exactly anti slave, because they depended on the crops, cotton and such, or raw materials like lumber, that the slave states were producing, and they had a lot of political power, so the idea that the north was going to eliminate slavery was an excuse. However, there was distaste towards the expansion of slavery, among which the industrialists feared that slavery would be used to run mills and factories in the new territories, and as badly as they paid their workers, they knew this would hurt them.
After secession, there were attempts at negotiations, and from what I have read one of the things the secessionists states pushed for was not keeping slavery legal, but rather, they wanted it allowed in all new territories, and the government turned those attempts away. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln only had one demand of the secessionist states, and that would be to swear allegiance to the union, abolishing slavery was not on the table, yet they still fought, and the reason was that merely keeping slavery was not enough. And it is patently obvious what states rights was about later on, after the emancipation proclamation, there were only two requirements to rejoin the union, swearing allegiance to the union and ending slavery, yet fighting went on for 2 1/2 years after that, so by then, it was slavery.
What really disturbs me is in these history standards (not necessarily Texas) the other myths that are being taught, like that slavery wasn’t bad for the slaves, that the system was somehow humane, or that the south was not an aristocracy dominated by the tiny planter class, I have seen state standards from down south over the years that talks about how the ordinary southern resident enjoyed a great standard of living thanks to slavery, and pointed to per capital income (while of course, not both showing how that if you normalized it, per capita median income would be very, very low, and that most of the income went to the planter class), and that is not history. Likewise, the arguments that the civil war wasn’t needed, that slavery would have ‘died out’ on its own, has been proven to be hogwash. Conventional wisdom is that slaves were not that productive, but the reality was that slaves were very productive, producing a lot at little cost relatively, not to mention the economy of selling slaves. It is also likely that had slavery endured, you would have seen factories and industries locating down south to take advantage of slave labor, much as later the mills and factories moved from the north to the south to take advantage of the cheap labor there.
I don’t know what this means, ucb. I doubt Texas, the Lonestar State and champion of states’ rights would intend to impose its state standards on any other states, or expect other states to follow suit.
^^ It means that textbook publishers will bend over backwards to sell history textbooks to Texas, and if it means adjusting content to meet this new teaching standard, then it will. It will not do the same for smaller states that don’t have that kind of buying power, so they end up buying the books that were designed for sale in Texas. So in effect, Texas is dictating how history is taught in many other states.
^That is a financial decision on the part of each state. If a state is so opposed to the content of a textbook, then they ought to finance the production of another one. That sounds like a lame excuse to me, sorry.
@bay:
Oh, please, that is a joke. States should finance the writing of a textbook if they don’t like what the textbook publishers are putting out thanks to Texas pressure? Do you know how much it costs to produce a text book? States have enough trouble buying textbooks these days,let alone producing them. Also, in many states, the books are bought by local school districts, not the state, so it is even less likely. The textbook market is also very consolidated these days, there simply aren’t many publishers out there, so there is even more likelyhood they will cater to a state like Texas with that kind of market. What’s next, biology books teaching that the earth is 6000 years old and was created in 6 days by God and evolution never happened, it is all a lie, only the Bible is truth? Texas is a state that tried to outlaw critical thinking as the basis for curicula in schools, because it challenged “long held beliefs” and this is another example of that, it is basically a curicula designed to show how the confederate cause was this noble endeavor in states rights and how great great grandpappy fought for his ‘country’ ie state, that slavery was not the big issue and besides, slavery wasn’t so bad (to quote something Rick Perry supposedly said, something to the effect that slaves and their descendants were fortunate to come to the US, that they became Christian and got all the blessings of this country"…whether he said it himself, it is an attitude that is out there and it isn’t all that uncommon). I can just see the other parts of those textbooks, that the US never, ever has made mistakes, done the wrong thing, since the US was created by God, how capitalism is blessed by God and the rest of the crazy agendas being promoted out there…
The real problem? Textbooks are supposed to be teaching kids to think, not promoting a myth to make people feel better about their ancestors, I don’t care if it is these kind of textbooks, or the more leftists ones that paint native american culture as this kind of utopia,or the textbooks that painted Lincoln as this demi God, or that the north acted out of altruism and abolition, they are supposed to be teaching what happened and also have kids think. Though given the way history is taught in the schools, where now most of the tests are true/false fill in te blank multiple choice answers, that is what we are getting, thoughtless pap to be regurgitated.
I’m not joking. It doesn’t seem that hard to me for state school districts to teach whatever standards their state demands, regardless of the textbook. Teachers can substitute different reading material for the chapter on the civil war if they are so opposed to how Texas wants it taught. Blaming Texas for changing everyone’s history education is a lame excuse. Texas may be a big state, but it is not the biggest. Why not use NY or CA’s textbooks if you don’t like Texas’?
Regardless of the textbook marketing issue, if someone in Texas who has control over the curriculum announces a change in that curriculum that results in students in Texas learning a slanted version of U.S. history, it is newsworthy. It would also be newsworthy if there were a similar situation in Alaska or Rhode Island.
One of the points that Janes Loewen makes in his book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is that, as a college history professor, it is the one field where it is better if the college student has never taken a history course. It is the one field where students have to unlearn their HS curriculum.
History as mythology, the need to have a cartoonish good vs. evil conflict, does both sides a disservice.
^That would be a relevant observation if colleges required their students to take courses in US History. Many or most of them don’t. High school AP US history suffices for the whole enchilada of the college grad’s knowledge.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-oks-new-history-textbooks-despite-complaints/
CBS didn’t think it was a lame excuse.
Of course it didn’t. CBS is headquartered in NY.
Exactly. I like the equal sign. They are one and the same.
What does one have to do with the other, bay? The article is nationwide. Is that a slam on NY? If so its out of line.
Bay, do you know anything about the textbook publishing business? I have friends who have worked at major textbook companies. This is a real issue. Not something made up.
Pizzagirl,
Not even Texas public schools are required to use textbooks approved by the Texas BOE. If some other state, (like IL?) has laws on its books requiring it to use another states’ approved textbooks, then that is their problem, not Texas’ fault.
If you read the original linked article, @Bay, you would see the controversy. Textbooks have to be modified within Texas to pass the TEKS standardized tests.
From the article:
So you see, this Texas eighth grade history teacher is saying he has to teach two versions - why the southern states say they seceded in 1860 and 1861, and what the Texas curriculum says are the reasons so his students can pass the standardized tests. If he taught only one of these, it would need to be the Texas version.
Here’s another story about it: http://www.smu.edu/News/2014/experts-textbook-controversy-10sept2014
On the plus side, it looks like Texas recently adopted environmental science books that teach the scientific theory of evolution rather than Creationism.
I read the article, and then re-read it again. I don’t see any evidence that Texas’ standards are forced on any other states. In fact, the article says publishers will revise content to meet each states’ standards. So the argument that Texas is forcing its version of history on other states is made up by…mostly people from the North, it appears to me.
One of my kids here in CA public school used the “American Pageant” history text that is also criticized in the article. Does that make CA “stupid” too? Probably, to some people.
Maybe Texas has made it harder for its teachers to teach only what they want to teach in American history classes. I don’t see that as a problem; it is a state issue for the states to decide.