'World War II-Turning Point' Shifts in U.S. History Textbooks: A Content Analysis.

摘要

This study set out to document certain changes that have taken place in secondary U.S. History textbooks from 1980 to the present extending on the seminal work of Frances FitzGerald in America Revised (1979) and Nathan Glazer and Reed Ueda in Ethnic groups in history textbooks (1983). Given the Education Reform Movement of the 1980's, this decade was chosen as the baseline against which the textbooks of the 90's and 00's could be measured. More specifically, the study aimed to determine whether or not the call for postmodern thoughts and multiculturalism in school curriculums has had a lasting significant effect on textbooks. Content analysis was conducted on 23 textbooks. This analysis included five factors: a historical figure's gender, race and/or ethnicity, index count, number of sentences allotted to historical figures in a given text and inclusion in a feature element within each World War II section. The textbook sample was made up of the most widely used textbooks from the three largest publishing companies, divided into approximately five year time frames starting from the year 1982, then moving through the decades to 2014. Of the 266 historical figures examined, 53.4% appeared only one time, in one text, over the 32-year span. 28.9% appeared no more than five times over the span of time. Only eight historical figures appeared in all 23 textbooks. In terms of total minority counts over time, the study showed a constant rise with the exception of the period between 1985-1989 where inclusion dipped from a sentence count average of 48 to 39.5. In all, 87% of the historical figures included were male, while 13% were female. Of these, 84% were Anglo/White, 4.5% were Black/African-American, 8.6% were Asian/Asian-American, 2.6% were Hispanic and zero Native Americans were referenced by name While not generalizable beyond the "turning point" examined in this study, essentialism, "basic and unchanged human nature" has in fact been replaced by postmodern principles to an extent. Aside from the eight historical figures which appeared in all 23 texts, names referenced more often than not appeared to be contextual and relative.