Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T03:40:28.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Triumph of the West”: American Education and the Narrative of Decolonization, 1930–1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

Stephen Jackson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits for colonial peoples, including literacy, good government, and peace, and anti-colonial nationalists were caricatured as irrational and ungrateful. US global engagement during and after World War II gradually changed the narrative, particularly following Philippine independence in 1946, as texts subsequently portrayed the US as an enlightened decolonizer. Postwar textbooks tended to argue that nationalism was a product of Western ideas and that anti-colonial nationalism was a triumph for Western civilization. While constructing this narrative of the spread of Western values, textbook authors largely marginalized colonial actors, promoted unflattering and stereotyped views of Africans and Asians, and de-emphasized the extreme violence inherent in the decolonization process.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 567 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Boak, Arthur E., Slosson, Preston W., Anderson, Howard R., and Langer, William L., World History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 433Google Scholar.

2 Sixteen of these texts were written between 1930 and 1945 and twenty-seven were written between 1946 and 1965. See the appendix for information on the textbooks used in this study.

3 The literature on the political and economic aspects of decolonization is voluminous, with many regional studies focusing on either a metropolitan or a colonial perspective. For general overviews of British and French decolonization in particular, see Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darwin, John, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Duara, Prasenjit, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; and Hyam, Ronald, Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918–1968 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. For a powerful exploration of the use of the term decolonization, see Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Foster, Stuart J., “Re-Thinking History Textbooks in a Globalized World,” in History Education and the Construction of National Identities, ed. Carretero, Mario, Asensio, Mikel, and Rodríguez-Moneo, María (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2012), 49Google Scholar.

5 Altbach, Philip, “The Unchanging Variable: Textbooks in Comparative Perspective,” in Textbooks in American Society: Politics, Policy, Pedagogy, ed. Altbach, Philip G., Kelly, Gail P., Petrie, Hugh G., and Weis, Lois (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 237Google Scholar.

6 Ian Westbury, “Textbooks, Textbook Publishers, and the Quality of Schooling,” in Textbooks and Schooling in the United States: Eighty-Ninth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. David L. Elliott and Arthur Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 2.

7 Foster, Stuart J. and Crawford, Keith A, eds., What Shall We Tell the Children? International Perspectives on History Textbooks (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2006), 1Google Scholar. Charles Ingrao echoes this sentiment, saying that “schoolbooks are part of a much greater legitimation process through which society's ruling elites wins the largely uncritical acceptance of the existing political, social, and economic system, together with the cultural attributes that reflect its hegemony.” Ingrao, Charles, “Weapons of Mass Instruction: Schoolbooks and Democratization in Multiethnic Central Europe,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 1, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 181Google Scholar.

8 Moreau, Joseph, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is a point Kyle Ward echoed in his work tracing the evolution of historical narratives across American history. Ward, Kyle, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years (New York: The New Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

9 FitzGerald, Frances, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979)Google Scholar.

10 Historian of education Gerard Giordano argues that the 1960s was a decade “during which educators placed an unprecedented emphasis on racial issues.” Gerard Giordano, Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars: A History of Advocacy and Opposition (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 76. For a thorough overview of the literature on this topic, see “Textbooks as Propaganda—The Racial Era,” in Giordano, Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars, 61–90; and Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

11 It is important to note that the United States has no centrally developed educational system. Each state constructs its own educational policies. However, national attempts to produce uniform curricula in the twentieth century led to the adoption of broadly similar courses across state lines. For more on the development of schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Steffes, Tracy, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For more information about textbooks and the Cold War, see, for example, Carlson, Dennis L., “Legitimation and Delegitimation: American History Textbooks and the Cold War,” in Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook, ed. de Castell, Suzanne, Luke, Allan, and Luke, Carmen (New York: Falmer Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hartman, Andrew, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Nash, Gary B., Crabtree, Charlotte, and Dunn, Ross E., History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 1997)Google Scholar.

14 For more on world history as a discipline, see Dunn, Ross, Mitchell, Laura, and Ward, Kerry, eds., The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Manning, Patrick, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Allardyce, Gilbert, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course,” Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 53Google Scholar.

16 Cartwright, William and Bining, Arthur C., The Teaching of History in the United States (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1950), 27Google Scholar.

17 Pulliam, William, The Status of World History Instruction in American Secondary Schools (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1972), 8–20Google Scholar.

18 Covering current events was an important method in establishing the relevance of a history course. Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Deane Walker argued that “the past cannot be divorced from the present with profit to any but the small minority who will love and thus study history for ‘history's sake.’ The alert teacher cannot view the events of today without recognizing that they are but repercussions of events that occurred in the past. Current events are an important element in a functional World History Course.” Indiana Department of Public Instruction, General Committee on Social Studies, World History for Senior High Schools (Indianapolis: D. Walker, Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1949), viii.

19 Giordano, Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars, 59.

20 For examples of literature exposing the tradition of denying American imperialism, see Ferguson, Niall, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)Google Scholar; Maier, Charles S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Garlitz, Richard P. and Jarvinen, Lisa, Teaching America to the World and the World to America: Education and Foreign Relations Since 1870 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Wrench, Jesse E., The March of Civilization: Modern World 1453–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), 388Google Scholar.

22 McKinley, Albert E., Howland, Arthur C., and Dann, Matthew Lincoln, World History To-Day (New York: American Book Co., 1931), 599Google Scholar.

23 Emery, Julia, Background of World Affairs (New York: World Book, 1942), 253Google Scholar.

24 Hayes, Carlton J. H., Thomas Moon, Parker, and Wayland, John W., World History (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 655Google Scholar.

25 Hayes, Moon, and Wayland, World History, 655.

26 Hayes, Moon, and Wayland, World History, 729.

27 Jansen, Jan C. and Osterhammel, Jürgen, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Perpiñan, J. E., “The Philippine Islands in American School Textbooks,” Journal of Experimental Education 2, no. 4 (June 1934), 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His call for a more balanced interpretation of Filipino history and culture went largely unheeded.

29 Most textbooks in the 1930s and 1940s typically racialized colonial peoples in negative ways. For more on the teaching of race in American classrooms, see impressive, Zoe Burkholder's Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race 1900–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

30 For more on American imperialism in the Philippines, see Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

31 Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing, 1972)Google Scholar. Jay Sexton similarly argues that nineteenth century “imperial anti-colonialism,” as embodied in debates about the Monroe Doctrine, profoundly shaped American attitudes toward decolonization in the twentieth century. Sexton, Jay, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011)Google Scholar.

32 Gavian, Ruth Wood and Hamm, William A., The American Story: A History of the United States of America (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1945), 470Google Scholar.

33 Perpiñan's survey of American textbooks, which similarly argued that “the activities of the United States were altruistic,” was a common theme frequently “impressed upon the mind of the American pupil.” Perpiñan, “The Philippine Islands in American School Textbooks,” 372.

34 Go, Julian, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Gavian and Hamm, The American Story, 473.

36 The 1942 textbook Background of World Affairs similarly praised American colonialism in the Philippines, saying, “The typical United States reforms—roads, public schools, and the improvement of sanitation—were launched in the Philippines.” Emery, Background of World Affairs, 263. For more on US construction of schools in the Philippines, see Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah, “‘We Were All Robinson Crusoes’: American Women Teachers in the Philippines,” Women's Studies 41, no. 4 (June 2012), 372–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Gavian and Hamm, The American Story, 473.

38 Gavian and Hamm, The American Story, 473.

39 Clif Stratton also argues that textbooks were important vehicles for perpetuating imperial norms in early twentieth-century American classrooms. Stratton, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 1–15.

40 Webster, Hutton and Wesley, Edgar B., World Civilization (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), 67Google Scholar. See also, Boak, et al. , World History (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1942)Google Scholar; and Emery, Background of World Affairs, 143. Geography textbooks also lauded the British Empire during the 1930s and 1940s. See Packard, Leonard O., Sinnot, Charles P., and Overton, Bruce, The Nations Today: A Physical, Industrial, and Commercial Geography (New York: Macmillan, 1940)Google Scholar; and Rugg, Harold O. and Krueger, Louise, Peoples and Countries (Boston: Ginn, 1936)Google Scholar.

41 R. O. Hughes is used as a primary example on treatment of the British Empire, but the British Empire received positive and extensive coverage in several textbooks in the survey between 1930 and 1945, including: Boak et al., World History; McKinley, Howland, and Dann, World History To-Day; Rogers, Lester B., Adams, Fay, and Brown, Walker, Story of Nations (New York: Henry Holt, 1945)Google Scholar; Hayes, Moon, and Wayland, World History; Webster and Wesley, World Civilization; and Wrench, The March of Civilization.

42 Hughes, R. O., The Making of Today's World (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1936), 672Google Scholar.

43 Webster and Wesley, World Civilization, 672.

44 Pahlow, Edwin W., Man's Achievement 2: The Age of Science and Discovery (Boston: Ginn, 1935), 584Google Scholar.

45 Although Hughes does not acknowledge it, it is possible he was influenced by Mayo's, Katherine important work Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927)Google Scholar. For a scholarly look at the impact of Mother India, see Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also her edition of Mayo's work: Mother India: Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text, with an Introduction by Mrinalini Sinha (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

46 Rogers, Adams, and Brown, Story of Nations, 384.

47 For a highly critical account of British imperialism in India, see Dirks, Nicholas B., Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Dirks argues that British colonialism in fact created many of the divisions that textbook authors pointed to, or at least made them rigidly inflexible. See also Dirks, , The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Rugg, Harold O. and Mendenhall, James E., Teachers Guide for Changing Civilizations in the Modern World (Boston: Ginn, 1930), 87Google Scholar.

49 Hughes, The Making of Today's World, 690–91.

50 Hughes, The Making of Today's World, 691.

51 Webster and Wesley, World Civilizations, 683.

52 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20Google Scholar.

53 Westad, The Global Cold War, 27.

54 Westad, The Global Cold War, 27.

55 Nash, Gary, Crabtree, Charlotte A., and Dunn, Ross E., History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 53–54Google Scholar.

56 Rogers, Adams, and Brown, Story of Nations, v.

57 Historians have pointed out that Philippine independence was, in reality, an example of American postwar informal imperialism, since the continued presence of military bases ensured that “the Philippines became the southern anchor of the American base system in East Asia.” Jansen and Osterhammel, Decolonization, 83.

58 Glenn W. Moon, Story of Our Land and People (New York: Henry Holt, 1949), 493.

59 For examples of the favorable treatment of the US in granting independence to the Philippines, see Casner, Mabel B. and Gabriel, Ralph H., The Story of American Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950)Google Scholar; Drummond, Donald F., Fraser, Dorothy M., and Alweis, Frank, Five Centuries in America (New York: American Book Co., 1964)Google Scholar; and Habberton, William, Roth, Lawrence V., and Spears, William, World History: The Story of Man's Achievements (River Forest, IL: Laidlaw Brothers, 1962)Google Scholar.

60 Hamm, William, From Colony to World Power: A History of the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1947), 704Google Scholar.

61 Hamm, From Colony to World Power, 704.

62 For more on American informal and formal means of control in the Pacific, see Fujiwara, Kiichi and Nagano, Yoshiko, eds., The Philippines and Japan in America's Shadow (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

63 Lane, Frederic C., Goldman, Eric, and Hunt, Erling, The World's History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 658Google Scholar.

64 University of the State of New York, Bureau of Secondary Curriculum Development, Teaching World History (Albany: New York State Education Department, 1959), 143.

65 Magenis, Alice and Appel, John Conrad, A History of the World (New York: American Book Co., 1955), 484Google Scholar.

66 Lane, Goldman, and Hunt, The World's History, 567.

67 Black, Cyril E., Our World History (Boston: Ginn, 1960), 448Google Scholar.

68 Bining, Arthur C., Howland, Arthur C., and Shryock, Richard H., This Our World: A Pageant of World History (New York: Newson, 1949), 548Google Scholar.

69 Lane, Goldman, and Hunt, The World's History, 655.

70 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 484.

71 Wallbank, T. Walter, Man's Story: World History in Its Geographic Setting (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1951), 716Google Scholar.

72 Black, Our World History, 663–64.

73 Black, Our World History, 664.

74 For more on the process and violence of partition in India and Pakistan, see Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Khan, Yasmin, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Lane, Goldman, and Hunt, The World's History, 651.

76 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 544.

77 Bining, Howland, and Shyrock, This Our World, 552.

78 Platt, Nathaniel and Drummond, Muriel Jean, Our World through the Ages (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 672Google Scholar.

79 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 388.

80 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 484.

81 Black, Our World History, 620.

82 Black, Our World History, 634.

83 Habberton, Roth, and Spears, World History, 637.

84 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 545.

85 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 545.

86 Drummond, Fraser, and Alweis, Five Centuries in America, 621.

87 Drummond, Fraser, and Alweis, Five Centuries in America, 623.

88 Andrew Hartman states that “in the twentieth century, the United States-the most powerful capitalist country in world history-created an educational system to aid capitalism and fight the Cold War.” Hartman, Education and the Cold War, 197.

89 Bragdon, Henry W. and McCutchen, Samuel P., History of a Free People (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 687Google Scholar.

90 Bragdon and McCutchen, History of a Free People, 689–91.

91 Martin Mayer asserted in 1962 that “ethnocentricity is so sealed into history teaching that its presence is rarely remarked.” Mayer, Martin, Where, When, and Why? Social Studies in American Schools (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)Google Scholar. For more examples of these criticisms, see Leinwand, Gerald and Feins, Daniel M., Teaching History and the Social Studies in Secondary Schools (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1968)Google Scholar; and Taylor, Harold, The World and the American Teacher: The Preparation of Teachers in the Field of World History (Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1968)Google Scholar.

92 Allardyce, “Toward World History,” 50–52.

93 Stavrianos, Leften S., ed., A Global History of Man (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1962)Google Scholar.

94 Stavrianos, A Global History of Man, 211.

95 Stavrianos, Leften S., The World Since 1500: A Global History (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 4Google Scholar.

96 Magenis and Appel, A History of the World, 542.

97 Joyce, Barry, The First U.S. History Textbooks: Constructing and Disseminating the American Tale in the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 4Google Scholar.