America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
by Donald Yacovone
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2022
464 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America's white supremacy—from the country's inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today's Black Lives Matter.
In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy's deep-seated roots in our nation's education system in a fascinating, in-depth examination of America's wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.
And, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks, that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation and racial injustice.
"Harvard historian Yacovone (coauthor, The African Americans) delivers a monumental assessment of 'how slavery, race, abolitionism and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught in our nation's K-12 schoolbooks' from the 1830s to the present...This troubling and powerful history is essential reading." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Education can be liberating. However, as this provocative survey demonstrates, it can also uphold the worst of the status quo...An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Yacovone] masterfully details how U.S. K–12 and college texts since the 1830s have inculcated whiteness as a national inheritance passed from generation to generation... accessible, thoroughly documented, and well-reasoned... essential reading for all interested in truly understanding America's past and the systemic distortions to repress and restrict the historical narrative with an insidious ideology." - Library Journal (starred review)
"The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory, Teaching White Supremacy places the development and institutionalization of American racial ideology squarely where it belongs: not in the slave South, but in the ostensibly free North, assaulting common perceptions of Northern racial exceptionalism. If we want to understand the roots of our current culture wars and our current battles over the place of race in American history classes, this marvelous book is the place to start. Yacovone's recovery of the long buried roots of racist discourse in our children's textbooks, is crucial to the creation of a long-deferred narrative of America's multi-racial past, and our multicultural present and future." - Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
"[A]t once a history of American education through the lens of white supremacist ideas, a revealing study of K-12 history textbooks, and an analysis of both the complicity in and the overturning of the racist-progress narrative in historical scholarship...For those wondering how we got here with book bannings, politicized school boards, librarians in duress, and maddening ignorance about the American past, here is the long view and the immediate challenge." - David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer-prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
"Teaching White Supremacy reveals in great detail the battle over historical memory in public schools and how the white elite has devoted extraordinary resources to perpetuating racist ideas in each generation through the K-12 curriculum...Yacovone documents the timeworn playbook guiding contemporary legislators in their campaign to censor teaching truthfully about racism and other forms of oppression in U.S. history...Those stories of resistance permeate the book and offer strategies and inspiration for those defending the right to teach outside the textbook today." - Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change and co-director of the Zinn Education Project
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Donald Yacovone's Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity is his ninth book. Yacovone is the lifetime Associate at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His book, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, co-written with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., won the 2014 NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, Harvard's highest honor in the field of African American studies. Yacovone earned a Ph.D. at the Claremont Graduate University and has taught at several colleges and universities. He helped edit the Black Abolitionist Papers, and before becoming the Manager of Research and Program Development at the Hutchins Center, Yacovone was the Senior Associate Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he founded and edited the Massachusetts Historical Review. He has written widely on abolitionism, gender, the African American role in the Civil War, white supremacy, and American cultural history.
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