American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution in American History

Teaching the Revolution Notes

  1. Maya Riser-Kositsky, “Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools,” Education Week, August 6, 2025, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts-about-american-schools/2019/01.
  2. Peter Jamison et al., “Home Schooling’s Rise from Fringe to Fastest-Growing Form of Education,” The Washington Post, October 31, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/.
  3. Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator [. . .] (Boston, 1797).
  4. State-based adoption processes have also distorted popular influence by incentivizing publishers to focus on the preferences of the most populous (and so most lucrative) states: California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Even so, these states represent quite different constituencies regionally, demographically, and ideologically, so their dominance still permits a decent diversity of options.
  5. For a synoptic study of 19th-century textbooks, see Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (University of Nebraska Press, 1964). On curricular reform and textbooks in the first half of the 20th century, see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2004). On 20th-century conflicts over history textbooks, see Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public . . . Schools, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
  6. The Columbian Orator’s primary competitor was Lindley Murray’s The English Reader, which sold between one and two million copies in the early 19th century. Granville Ganter, “The Active Virtue of The Columbian Orator,” The New England Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1997): 463, https://www.jstor.org/stable/366763.
  7. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845), 39–40.
  8. Bingham, The Columbian Orator, 53–54.
  9. Pitt’s and Fox’s pro-American speeches are at Bingham, The Columbian Orator, 58–60, 156–58, 172–75, 184–85. “Address of Mr. Adet, French Ambassador, on Presenting the Colors of France to the United States, 1796” and Washington’s response are at Bingham, The Columbian Orator, 85–88. Bingham also includes several speeches of Napoleon’s from this period.
  10. The 1819 edition, for example, features the poet David Everett and speeches by John Lothrop and John Phillips, father of the more famous orator Wendell Phillips.
  11. D. A. Saunders, “Social Ideas in McGuffey Readers,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1941): 580, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2744701.
  12. Saunders, “Social Ideas in McGuffey Readers,” 584.
  13. William H. McGuffey, The Eclectic Second Reader [. . .] (Cincinnati, 1836), 30–31.
  14. William H. McGuffey, McGuffey’s New Third Eclectic Reader: For Young Learners (Cincinnati, 1865), 94.
  15. McGuffey, The Eclectic Second Reader, 45.
  16. Johann N. Neem, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 41.
  17. Neem, Democracy’s Schools, 45.
  18. McGuffey, The Eclectic Second Reader, 112–15, 128–36. The story of the cherry tree also appears in McGuffey, McGuffey’s New Third Eclectic Reader, 233–36.
  19. McGuffey, The Eclectic Second Reader, 138.
  20. See, for example, William H. McGuffey, Eclectic Fourth Reader, 6th. ed. (Cincinnati, 1838), xi–xii.
  21. McGuffey, Eclectic Fourth Reader, xii.
  22. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 39.
  23. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Harvard University Press, 1974).
  24. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 11–28.
  25. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 18.
  26. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 12–13.
  27. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 23.
  28. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 60.
  29. Harold Rugg, Man and His Changing Society (Ginn, 1930), 2:iv; and Harold Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, vol. 5 (Ginn, 1931). Each of the six volumes of the series opens with a preface devoted to these considerations.
  30. Harold Rugg, Man and His Changing Society (Ginn, 1930), 3:iii.
  31. This is even the title of the first chapter of the first volume. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society (Ginn, 1929), 1:3.
  32. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 1:10–11.
  33. On Morse, see Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 1:323–25. On Bell, see Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 1:329–32.
  34. Harold Rugg, Man and His Changing Society (Ginn, 1931), 4:14.
  35. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:30–46.
  36. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:53.
  37. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:67, 76, 80.
  38. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:85.
  39. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:131.
  40. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:141.
  41. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:146.
  42. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:146.
  43. Zimmerman, Whose America?, 60–61.
  44. Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard University Press, 2015), 75; and Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 172–73.
  45. Thomas Bailey, American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 5th ed. (D. C. Heath, 1975), 107.
  46. I borrow this phrase from the title of one of the most popular textbooks of the past 30 years, Alan Brinkley’s The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People.
  47. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:14.
  48. See, for example, David Randall et al., Skewed History: Textbook Coverage of Early America and the New Deal, National Association of Scholars, 2021, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED616081.pdf.
  49. Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., eds., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021), 10–32, 52. Although The New York Times describes the book as intended for ninth- through 12th-grade students, the Pulitzer Center’s curriculum guides introduce it in middle school, so I will treat it here as an analogue to Rugg’s and McGuffey’s texts. See, for example, 1619 Project, Education Materials Collection, “What Is the Legacy of Durham’s Black Wall Street?,” November 2, 2024, https://1619education.org/builder/lesson/what-legacy-durhams-black-wall-street.
  50. Hannah-Jones et al., eds., The 1619 Project, 452.
  51. Hannah-Jones et al., eds., The 1619 Project, 452.
  52. Sarah Schwartz, “A Wave of New Legislation Aims to Ban DEI in Public Schools,” Education Week, March 26, 2025, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/a-wave-of-new-legislation-aims-to-ban-dei-in-public-schools/2025/03.
  53. Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 4:x.
  54. See, for example, Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020), chap. 2.
  55. National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade history scores have decreased on average from their peak, in 2010–14, to levels first observed in the initial 1994 test. The share of total American bachelor’s degrees in history has fallen from 2.2 percent in 1990 to 1.1 percent in 2021 and in political science from 3.3 percent to 1.9 percent. Nation’s Report Card, “NAEP Report Card: U.S. History,” https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/achievement/; US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 325.92. Degrees in Economics, History, Political Science and Government, and Sociology Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Level of Degree: Selected Academic Years, 1949–50 Through 2020–21,” 2022, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_325.92.asp; and US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 318.10. Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Academic Years, 1869–70 Through 2031–32,” 2022, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_318.10.asp.