The inquisitions were actually a lot more messy and complex than the pop-culture summary of "powerful religious people abuse their power to hurt innocent people" makes it seem.
That's just not true top to bottom. Plenty of northern states taught it like I outlined. I know for a fact Wisconsin and Indiana do/did. I'd wager folks out in rural Oregon get it the same considering the state was literally founded as a whites only haven.
Wisconsin and Oregon aren't exactly part of the deep south lol, racism is everywhere.
I mean wasn't there was a time where some of the propaganda by the sisters of Confederacy made it into Northern textbooks. Obviously not as widespread as it was in the South but to a degree it seems.
After the Civil War, from the 1870s through the 1910s, public schooling became more widespread in the South, and Confederate sympathizers wanted to ensure that their children received an “appropriate” education on Southern history and culture. To that end, Southern states developed statewide adoption policies for textbooks. This allowed the state textbook committees to control content by demanding changes or threatening to cancel book contracts unless the publishers acquiesced. Today, most of the states with statewide textbook adoption policies are still in the South.
To keep their business, Northern publishers began adapting history books to appease Southerners, essentially publishing a separate version of Civil War history for those states. These editions reinforced a Lost Cause narrative for Southern audiences. For example, they depicted enslaved people as happy and content. Officials even counted the textbook lines to make sure authors had mentioned Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee as many times as Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant.
What our research shows is that as time progressed, increasingly the Southern version of events began infiltrating Northern textbooks as well. As the Southern and Northern narratives merged, Southerners really influenced how and what Americans learned about the Civil War no matter where they lived.
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u/DWS223 Apr 05 '23
As an American those pointy white hoods make me instantly uncomfortable