Confederate Textbooks

Eugene F Provenzo Jr.

Opposition to the use of school textbooks written by Northern authors—which to a large degree reflected a set of values and beliefs that were specific to the North—became a particularly prominent issue in the years immediately prior to the Civil War. This entry looks at the history of that conflict and at the creation of alternative textbooks by the Confederacy that were more consistent with their political and ideological values. Throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, the writing and publication of textbooks in the United Stares was dominated by the North. With the exception of William Holmes McGuffey (1800–1873), the principal textbook authors prior to the Civil War were from New England. Noah Webster, Jediah Morse, S. G. Goodrich, C. A. Goodrich, S. Augustus Mitchell, Jesse Olney, and Emma Willard were all from Connecticut; Lyman Cobb, William Woodbridge, Richard Parker, and Salem Town were from Massachusetts; ...

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