2 - Schoolbooks and the Teaching of Merovingian History

Summary

The phenomena of history should be so recorded as to aid the reader, and particularly the young reader, in discovering its philosophy, instead of being recorded as they have hitherto generally been, in such a way as to obliterate the better instincts of humanity.

Horace Mann

AMONG THE MOST significant publishing phenomena of the first half of the nineteenth century was a veritable explosion in the production of books aimed at juvenile readers. History and social studies schoolbooks were among those juvenile publications being printed at an accelerating rate, at the same time that these subjects’ essential place within American elementary and especially secondary education—following European trends—became more firmly established in curricula. Whereas for much of the preceding colonial era, history as a discrete subject area had not played a significant role within writing and grammar school courses-of-study, its presence gradually expanded from the late-eighteenth century into the first half the nineteenth, initially within the contexts of private tutoring and academies. But by mid-century history had become an entrenched part of the curriculum within public high schools too—the first of which opened in Boston in 1821. While, not surprisingly, books that taught basic literacy skills dominated the schoolbook market, between 1816 and 1840 seven percent of all editions of American schoolbooks published were works of history.

In contrast, colleges, which serviced only a minority of the population, proved to be outliers in this curricular trend, for it was there that “history began earliest, but developed slowest,” as “colleges tolerated history…as a literary amusement for the students, taught by a professor whose major concern was languages or philosophy.” The sub-field of medieval European history was particularly ill-served; Henry Adams (1838–1918), in reflecting back on his appointment in 1870 as the first professor of medieval history at Harvard University—an institution whose curriculum at time of his hire contained “a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill”—had to admit that “down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.” Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, little in the way of serious, sustained attention to the medieval period could be found within America colleges and universities.