History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right by Gregory M. Pfitzer (review)

Gregory Pfitzer has written an interesting book, ostensibly about the republication of outdated history texts for today’s Christian homeschoolers, but more substantively about the debates surrounding children’s understanding of history during the nineteenth century. History Repeating Itself is clear, well written, and insightful, a strong contribution to childhood studies and, in its way, to the teaching of history.

Pfitzer organizes his chapters thematically, with each devoted to a different aspect of historical writing, ranging from issues of narrative structure and evidence to perspective and causation. Chapters open with discussions of a particular nineteenth-century history book and the Christian press that has chosen to republish it. Popular titles include the works of Samuel G. Goodrich, Jacob and John Abbot, Josephine Pollard, and Elbridge S. Brooks, all of whom wrote popular children’s histories between the 1840s and 1890s. For today’s conservative parents, these titles derive authority from their age: written shortly after the events they describe, and presumably before professional educators and historians could pervert the narrative, parents assume that they reveal truths about American history that were once known and agreed upon. “Because they are reprints from an earlier time,” writes one mother, “I trust them to be more accurate than most of today’s revised history books” (9). From Pfitzer’s perspective, such sentiments reflect a worldview in which “the worth of reissued [texts] … resides in their ability to repeat and reaffirm canonical beliefs,” and in which “repetition, even redundancy, implies something meaningful about how the past functions to stabilize and sustain a culture over time” (10).

Pfitzer rejects such oversimplified visions of the past. He points out that nineteenth-century texts were products of their time and does an excellent job positioning them within period debates about the nature of history and children’s ability to grasp it. Many of the authors themselves struggled with the ways in which they presented their subjects—Goodrich, for example, came to consider himself “nothing better than a falsifier of history, one who had relied too heavily on the ‘fictive or merely imaginable’”—and many of the books were revised and bowdlerized through subsequent editions (43). “Unfortunately,” writes Pfitzer, “the details of these complex production histories are often lost on twenty-first-century homeschooling purchasers … [whose] comments betray a troubling lack of awareness of these complicated origins” (54). One of the most interesting aspects of History Repeating Itself is the degree to which conservatives themselves have switched sides on these debates. It was fascinating to learn that fights over phonics versus “whole language” reading instruction did not begin with the Dick-and-Jane readers of the 1950s but with the Pestalozzian movement of the 1840s, and that today the same conservatives who tend to be outspoken on the rigor of phonics apparently favor single-syllable history books as a means to make the subject more accessible (70, 101–130).

Nevertheless, History Repeating Itself raises some thorny questions about the interaction between political ideology and historical interpretation, both for homeschoolers and for those that study them. Pfitzer does not offer a particularly rich portrait of Christian homeschooling, and omits much of the secondary literature available on the subject. Instead, he relies on quotations from the owners of Christian presses, most of whom come across poorly. Regardless of whether these people represent the homeschooling movement as a whole, one wonders how much generosity Pfitzer owes them. There do, after all, exist articulate critiques of modernity and modern historical writing; conservatives like G. K. Chesterton and Russell Kirk argue that civilization has been in decline since the Reformation. The parents Pfitzer studies are reaching for similar sentiments, though they are unable to voice or fully comprehend them. Is he obligated to acknowledge the validity of some conservative perspectives, lest he dismiss the entire intellectual tradition? Or would that grant too...