From what voices and sources have Texas learned about their state’s history of slavery and emancipation over time?
In recent years, “classroom culture wars” have exploded, particularly in history classrooms. Americans are grappling with their understanding of their national history, which is inexplicably tied to understandings of identity and community. Specifically, the established norm of white supremacy is being disrupted by historical narratives from historically marginalized cultural groups. Within recent years, we have seen an increase in recognition of marginalized cultural groups, particularly within schools with diverse student bodies; however, the lack of a standardized national curriculum has complicated this. Each state sets its own standards. As a result, state education standards are constantly changing.
Historically conservative states like Texas often emerge in national media as especially tumultuous and controversial arenas for history education. Many Americans have, at least, a vague sense that Texas faces unique issues of historical education compared to other states. But what are those issues?
There are many ways to approach this question, and we have chosen to investigate the issues surrounding the teaching of slavery, emancipation, and systemic racism. Our historical inquiry is: from what voices and sources have Texas learned about their state’s history of slavery and emancipation over time?
With our project, we seek to engage high school and college students to think about how students over time have encountered and resisted a range of narratives about slavery.
This archive does not strive to tell the history of slavery and emancipation Texas, nor does it reproduce a corpus of history textbooks used in Texas to tell this history. Rather, by closely analyzing a variety of primary sources and reflecting on their personal experiences with history education, we encourage students to consider the relationships and tensions between a range of different perspectives on how to tell a “true” Texas story. From there, we hope students will draw comparisons with their own communities, states, and nations in order to gain insight into core issues that history teachers and students are grappling with inside classrooms.
Below is our archive of all of these documents, however, for a more interactive approach to this archive, our project can be found here.
