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WM Professor In Spotlight After Spotting Textbook ErrorBy Amber Lester Kennedy Saturday, October 23, 2010
A textbook used in elementary schools inaccurately claims thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy.
Sheriff, a professor of history at The College of William and Mary, couldn’t resist the urge to flip through the book, called “Our Virginia: Past and Present.” As a member of a college committee working to coordinate a conference on the Civil War in 2013, she was curious to see how children are educated about the war. What she found left her dismayed. While she says most of the book’s Civil War discussion agrees with modern research, it has one big factual error. One section devoted to the role of African-Americans in the war states, “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” Sheriff says that although it’s possible a small number of slaves fought alongside their masters, it isn’t supported by Civil War scholarship, and no proof exists that Jackson ever commanded black troops. She contacted James Robertson, a professor at Virginia Tech known as the pre-eminent Jackson expert, who confirmed he had no knowledge of such battalions. “This claim was indisputably factually wrong; it was not a trivial mistake, but one that gets to the heart of what the war was about,” she says. Her discovery, first reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, has snowballed into a national discussion about textbook inaccuracies, thrusting Sheriff into the media spotlight this week. Aside from The Washington Post, she’s conducted interviews with MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann and NPR’s Morning Edition. As a result of the coverage, the book’s publishers, Five Ponds Press, announced it will issue sticker labels that can be pasted over the paragraph. Sheriff’s daughter attends school in Williamsburg-James City County’s division, and Acting Superintendent Scott Burckbuchler released a statement Thursday indicating the schools will receive the labels for the books in the next few weeks. The textbook, only in its first semester of use, was chosen this summer by a committee consisting of WJCC staff members and community representatives. Before voting 4-2 to approve the book in July, the School Board invited citizens to inspect the textbook at public events. The division purchased textbooks for fourth grade and sixth grade from the publisher for $88,825. Because of her work with the conference, which will be part of a statewide initiative to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the start of the war, Sheriff thought mentioning the error could start a national conversation about the study of the Civil War. With her fellow committee members, she drafted an opinion piece for The Washington Post that focused on recognizing the challenges the nation will face when it commemorates the war. “We were using the error in the textbook as a springboard for addressing larger issues about how we should grapple with commemorating the Civil War during its 150th anniversary,” she says. At the same time, she planned to send a letter to Five Ponds Press, based in Connecticut, to notify the publisher of the error. Her plans were thwarted, however, when the news division of The Washington Post learned of her piece opinion and decided to write a front-page story about the gaffe. They spoke with the author, Joy Masoff, who said she found the information through Internet research; the sites she used each referred to research conducted by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. The Post also talked to Charles Pyle, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, who said the book was vetted by a committee of three elementary school teachers. Sheriff is careful to say that although the error was big, she doesn’t think it was intentional. “To my knowledge, there is no evidence there was some sort of coordinated effort by state education officials to perpetuate this idea in the book,” she says, adding that while the state curriculum requires students to learn about African-Americans’ experiences during the Civil War, the curriculum mentions nothing about their possible service in the Confederacy. The bigger issue, she says, is the challenges Americans face when choosing how to explain the Civil War to students, including grappling with “the facts we would not always like to see there.” “Our goal should be to understand the past as it unfolded, not as we wish it had unfolded,” she says. The conversation might not have occurred the way she imagined it, but Sheriff can’t deny people are certainly talking about the issue now. “I just hope we can stay more focused on not what happened in the past, but what we can do in the future,” she says. “How should publishers be creating these texts? We can use this incident to offer students a lesson on how you critically read a book and how you do research. We want kids to think about that – just because someone wrote it, that doesn’t mean it’s true.” Burckbuchler reached out to Sheriff and invited her to collaborate with WJCC schools when the time comes to discuss the Civil War (she says her daughter just learned about the settling of Jamestown). “I would love if this led to a more direct conversation about how does one do research responsibly?” she says. She’s already had that conversation in her own house, where she says her daughter’s reaction has been, “Why can’t you just let it go?” She told her she had not only a professional obligation to correct the error, but a parental obligation because not every student has a parent who has studied this topic in depth. “It really got her thinking actively about how history is written,” she says. |
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Comments
1) it's "secession", not "sucession".
(I usually don't think spelling is germane to internet conversations, but in this case, it happens to be.)
2) While the Civil War was about secession, one of the, if not THE, primary reason for wanting to secede, centered around slavery- at least at the top level (the wealthy and the politicians- the people usually responsible for war).
I point you to Stephens Cornerstone Speech, as well as S.Carolinas Declaration on the Causes of Secession (particularly important because the first shots fired were in S.Carolina by Confederates against U.S. military forces). You may also want to review Jefferson Davis's early words on the the reasons for secession (property devaluation due to lack of slaves, etc).
Later Davis backtracks and claims it was all about secession, no slavery involved.
(Not the first time a politician flip-flopped nor the last).
It's true that the majority of soldiers fighting for the Confederacy were not slave holders, and were fighting what they saw as an encroachment by the Federal Gov't. They were brave men, fighting battles that their leaders told them had to be fought. Leaders who wanted to hold on to power, $$, and a way of life.
There's no need to whitewash the Civil War. The wealthy, powerful jerks of the time got a lot of people killed. Again, not the first time, nor the last.
Let us grieve for, and respect the footsoldiers on both sides, who bravely did what they were told was right and necessary by the men who were entrusted with power- but we should historically hold the guys in charge responsible, and not sweep under the carpet WHY they convinced the ordinary guys at the time to pick up arms, and fight to protect what was essentially property values and social conventions.
No substantiation, unless it was assumed to be true, as was the following quote:
"Dr. Lewis Steiner, Chief Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed General Stonewall Jackson's occupation of Frederick, Maryland, in 1862. He wrote:
Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in this number [of Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie knives, dirks, etc. ... and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army"
The above doesn't seem factual to me! We do know that African Americans fought alongside the Union forces, and they could have picked up the "uniforms" they wore, from the confederates.
Young minds believe that everything in print is true (because most teachers say it is), and it must be born in mind that many untruths have been printed and are now in place in many adult minds, as facts. That causes substantial misinterpretati on of history, a sad state of affairs.
Today's lies told during political campaigns, are seldom corrected after an election. Some are obvious, and some are not. Before you believe any candidate, historian, or public figure, research what has been said in reliable resources (not wikipedia. Remember that to assume, makes an "ass-(out of) u- and me".
Kudos to Professor Sheriff
Can the school system get its money back? I like the possibility additional resources correcting the error will stir discussion. Their pro-slavery greed was certainly the reason for the Southern states to try to separate from the USA.
Dr. Lewis Steiner, Chief Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed General Stonewall Jackson's occupation of Frederick, Maryland, in 1862. He wrote:
Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in this number [of Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie knives, dirks, etc. ... and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army
Black Confederates By Charles Kelly Barrow
Maybe if schools also taught logic, reading and writing papers would be easier for students.
I highly recommend everyone reading "The thinking toolbox" By Nathanael & Hans Bluedron with their kids 4th grade and older. This topic, btw, is chapter 12. (A good follow up to that book is "The Fallacy detective" by the same authors.)