Review - Donald Yacovone. Teaching White Supremacy- America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

Abstract

In 1866, a year after the end of the American Civil War, school children encountered a new textbook entitled,
A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the United States. Attributing the war to an anti-slavery conspiracy that
involved British efforts to undermine American democracy, A Youth’s History argued that Republicans forced
the South to secede despite a harmonious slave society that included benevolent masters and loyal, contented
slaves. The authors, John H. Van Evrie and Rushmore G. Horton, were northerners and their book was yet
another example of an immense and sustained effort in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to shape a national
white identity via a white supremacist historical narrative. In the recently published Teaching White Supremacy:
America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of National Identity, historian Donald Yacovone examines school
textbooks and other historical accounts to argue that “northern white supremacy,” rather than slavery, became
“the more enduring cultural binding force” that dominated history classrooms until the 1960s (5).