Gregory M. Pfitzer. History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right.

Extract

Gregory M. Pfitzer is a historian in the American Studies tradition who specializes in the history of the book. This volume, History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right, builds upon his 2002 work Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900, which examined nineteenth-century patriotic historical visual imagery, and his 2008 work Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920, which chronicled the growth of mass-produced American histories from the 1840s to the 1920s. While researching these topics Pfitzer became aware that many of these nineteenth-century books, especially those written for children, are being republished today by small-scale Christian presses for use among homeschoolers.

Pfitzer has three goals in this book. First, he wants to chronicle these homeschooling presses’ efforts to resurrect nineteenth-century books for today. To do this he quotes extensively from homeschooling publishers’ propaganda. Second, he situates the nineteenth-century books being reissued in their own context. In order to provide perspective, he takes a roughly chronological look at six figures: Samuel Goodrich, Jacob and John S. C. Abbott, Josephine Pollard, Charles Carleton Coffin, Elbridge S. Brooks, and Charles Morris. Third, he argues against the use of these nineteenth-century textbooks as curriculum for today’s children. Pfitzer achieves this objective by using his historical contextualizations to refute the claims made by the publishers in their propaganda. The book is thus history in the service of polemic.