Whose America?

by Zimmerman, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780674018600
• ISBN10: 0674018605
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America.In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice.But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Beyond Dayton and Chicago	1	(8)
I HISTORY WARS	9	(204)
Ethnicity and the History Wars	13	(19)
Struggles over Race and Sectionalism	32	(23)
Social Studies Wars in New Deal America	55	(26)
The Cold War Assault on Textbooks	81	(26)
Black Activism, White Resistance, and Multiculturalism	107	(28)
II GOD IN THE SCHOOLS
Religious Education in Public Schools	135	(25)
School Prayer and the Conservative Revolution	160	(26)
The Battle for Sex Education	186	(27)
Epilogue: Searching for Common Ground	213	(18)
Abbreviations	231	(2)
Notes	233	(62)
Acknowledgments	295	(2)
Index	297