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270CIVIL WAR HISTORY shalling of a variety of types of evidence and a variety of methods of study. The failure of the 1965 Fleming Lectures to enunciate a clear stand on this important question constitutes a flaw in a provocative study. Thomas J. Pkessly University of Washington Guardians of Tradition: American SchoolbooL· of the Nineteenth Century . By Ruth Miller Elson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Pp. xiii, 424. $7.00.) In a critically detailed and well-written study of more than one thousand popular nineteenth-century American common-school textbooks, Ruth Miller Elson has provided a revealing assessment of the "attitudes which make up the lowest common denominator of American history." Hers is a manifesüy important attempt to understand the world of "fantasy made up by adults as a guide for their children." As such, Guardians of Tradition is a valuable book. Nineteenth-century education in the United States acquired a modest but mixed reputation for its dependence upon textbooks. In 1847, for example, the Reverend Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools for Upper Canada and the most prominent educational reformer in that country, sharply criticized American textbooks as "so constructed as to require very little labour on the part of either Teacher or Pupil. . . . [This] anti-intellectual method of teaching, and the books which appertain to it, are very properly condemned." From Massachusetts came similar misgivings. Horace Mann, Henry Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson worried about teachers' excessive dependence upon textbooks. But the textbook, a tangible proof of utilitarian and edifying instructional purposes, survived these ripples of complaint to become the surrogate American teacher. In addition to being "anti-intellectual," American schoolbooks displayed a stolidly pedantic and altogether tendentious unanimity on major ideological questions of American character throughout the nineteenth century. Their shared biases survived changes wrought in other spheres by the Civil War, immigration, the rise of the city, and the proliferation of knowledge. Surprisingly few and generally unimportant changes in content and aim appeared . The schoolbooks rather consistently taught that the ideal American was the conservative New Englander. "New England's virtues," chorused the textbooks, "are those of the United States; its character is the American character. ..." If one attempts to trace that character in a few bold strokes the lines show a male, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant farmer who exults in his favored place nationally, racially, and religiously, and works diligently to become a worthy beneficiary of the faith in work, duty, and self-improvement . He knows that wealth is the reward of virtue, that Popery is sinister, that the races have been assigned stations in the Great Scheme of Things (with the white man at the highest station and the black man at the lowest), that moral purpose controls all operations of nature, that Jews are miserly, BOOK REVIEWS271 females inferior, and America destined to fulfill special Providential purposes . Even in its more elaborate detail, this image is not novel; it has been traced before by students of American textbooks in several briefer historical treatments (including notably Richard D. Mosier's Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers, which Elson unaccountably overlooked, along with several other valuable secondary sources). But Guardians of Tradition demonstrates, as has no earlier work, the sweep of ideological agreement among America's moralizing nineteenthcentury textbook authors. Elson's study thus brings greater depth and sophistication to innumerable broad questions of American intellectual and educational history. Her analysis understandably makes no claim to measure the influence schoolbooks exerted upon American youth. Nor is Elson's legitimate purpose thereby any the less well served. "To what extent an individual may be influenced by concepts implicit in his schoolbooks," she notes, "is a question that needs the attention of the psychologist as well as of the social scientist." One could nonetheless argue that her portrayal of the composite purpose of nineteenth-century schoolbooks does amount to an important suggestion about their influence. For the readers, spellers, arithmetics, histories, and geographies preached the same values regularly found in popular self-help literature, dime novels, magazines, sermons, and patriotic pronouncements in America. If we shall never know how studiously the nineteenth-century child used his textbook, there remains...

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