An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.
Education can be liberating. However, as this provocative survey demonstrates, it can also uphold the worst of the status quo.
“As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears…there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ ” The authors of that statement were Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, two eminent historians whose work is still studied today. As Yacovone, an associate at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African American Research, observes, the textbook in which that spectacularly racist—and incorrect—statement occurs was a standard for many years. Beginning with the founding of the republic, writes Yacovone, textbooks have been primary instruments for transmitting “ideas of white American identity,” even asserting that this identity is definitively White and that, as one 1896 textbook stated, “to the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.” Current textbooks have plenty of problems, as well. Yacovone points out that only in the last decade have Texas history textbooks acknowledged slavery, and not states’ rights, as the primary cause of the Civil War. It is from history textbooks, he adds, that the terms White supremacy and master race entered the lexicon, and it has been from textbooks that excuses for the subjugation of some peoples and extermination of others have found learned justification. Even textbooks—and Yacovone has pored over hundreds—that condemned the secessionist movement were often inclined to consider the enslaved population as “a degraded and inferior people.” Interestingly, the author links some of the worst excesses to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War era, when textbook publishers and authors were avid to erase differences between North and South—White differences, anyway.
An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31663-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
