Dear Friends,
If you recall, I began writing a novel set in Maryland this year. I’m enjoying the Quaker Woman’s Cookbook and I’ve been making my way through “The Annals of Sandy Spring.” These original sources are fantastic, but if you’re a person of a certain age, you may recall taking “state history,” most often in middle school, and being issued a textbook.
Textbooks about Maryland?
Was there a textbook about Maryland, a state I’ve barely been to? I would welcome a book that would explain everything about the state to me including its geography and history––an overview of the state before I dove into the details.
I loved glossy textbooks
Back in my own middle school days, I was a certified nerd and probably one of the nerdiest things about me was my love of textbooks. If it was the first year the book was used, that was the best! The book would be clean and no one would have written in it and then erased it later. The cover might be an exciting, glossy thing with some photo or picture that conveyed how awesome the subject at hand would be. These subjects included trigonometry! I remember struggling with the subject matter, but I absolutely loved the cover of my trig book that I think depicted some type of green light wave. It was sort of trippy and psychedelic and fun! It made me think that there might be some sort of connection between the confusing content of the book and what might eventually happen: I’d understand what was going on on the cover of the book! Unfortunately, this never happened (I think it happens when you take calculus but I didn’t make it that far).
No more textbooks?
By the time my own kids studied state history in Massachusetts, the textbook seemed to have become a thing of the past. And because at the time my daughters were in middle and high school, not everyone had a computer to read an online textbook on, their backpacks were often stuffed with reams of paper copies of original sources, which seemed to be the new “go-to” source for state history.
In which I read a textbook as an adult…
Before my trip to Texas last year for the Historical Novel Society, I was delighted to find that a Texas State History textbook exists for middle schools. Given that I only had 14 points of reference for Texas (yes, I counted them) including “Houston is very hot,” via my husband, and my extensive viewing of “Dallas” back in the 1980’s, I decided to read a textbook about Texas. Why not? Again, I’d get an overview and some exciting historical insights before I met Texans and visited the Alamo.
Textbooks turn out to be controversial!
I learned that several states no longer have current state textbooks, but California and Texas still do.
The New York Times reported on the most widely used Texas textbook: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html The article explains that while the California and Texas textbooks share some of the same publisher and material, many events and issues are presented quite differently, and the Texas textbook, not surprisingly, was much more conservative.
The bad…
Despite the controversy, I started my study of the Texas textbook with the same enthusiasm I’d once had for my trigonometry book. Still, I am a moderate liberal and the Texas textbook confounded me. To wit: the bad…
- A tip for English Language Learners mentioned in the book: if you’re struggling to get through this book, why not get up a couple of hours early and tackle it? (Or, perhaps the textbook companies to could produce a dual-language version I thought??)
- No women are mentioned for the first 150 or so pages. Apparently there weren’t women back in Europe, or among the Native Americans, or among the white men of the frontier (hmm…that could actually be true––the frontier men part)
- The mind-numbing task of trying to remember which country or group (Mexico, Spain, France, the U.S.) occupied which region in which year. I was really trying here but it’s hella confusing!
- I love how every European is described as an “explorer” including the French whose goal it was to conquer the Spanish.
The good…
- I really liked that the book started with geography. Do kids still learn about geography? It’s really cool and probably one of the least political things to write about. Where does water come from? What’s the advantage of having a river in an area where you’re looking to settle?
- More women and their contributions were mentioned as the book went on. Lady Bird Johnson! A woman who defends a fort with cannons!
- Some kid out there probably got an A+ in state history this year. I think of that. Someone stayed up late at night memorizing everything about the Alamo. That person could become a historic fiction writer, and they’ve probably exercised their brain quite a bit.
- There is an emphasis on critical thinking throughout the book with students asked to answer thoughtful questions…but I’d prefer the students be able to formulate their own questions since some of the questions are biased (“What are the disadvantages of renewable resources?”)
All in all, this textbook gets a mixed review. I thought it might provide a “neutral” overview of a complicated state, but I found bias throughout. Then again, isn’t this true of most historical texts?
If you know of a great textbook on Maryland, let me know!
Happy Almost Summer, Kate