Textbooks and the Curriculum

Textbooks as Curriculum and Cultural Capital.
Textbooks and Their Role in the History of Education.
The McGuffey Readers.
The Dick and Jane Readers.
The Textbook Business.
Controversies Over the Content of Books.
State Adoptions of Textbooks.
Textbooks in a Post-Typographic Culture.

Historical textbook resources online include:

Sample Pages from the Dick and Jane Readers
http://www.valpo.edu/home/faculty/bflak/dickjane/

New England Primer
http://my.voyager.net/~jayjo/primer.htm

The Noah Webster House
http://www.ctstateu.edu/noahweb/index.html

The American Textbook Council has a useful web site where you can learn more about current issues and textbooks.

American Textbook Council
http://www.historytextbooks.org/index.htm

NetQuest #13
Exploring 19th Century Textbooks

The University of Pitttsburgh has an outstanding collection of nineteenth century textbooks that they have put online. Go to their website at:

19th Century Textbooks(University of Pittsburgh)gh)
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/

On the home page of this site click on the “Full-Text Collection.” When you have gone to the Full Text Collection page click on the Browse a List of Books Available Online.  Look at any of the dozens of texts available.

Once you have browsed a bit click on the Full-Text Simple Search. Search for a topic you are interested by typing in a search word such as “Lincoln,” “Slavery,” “Teacher.” Write a three or four paragraph summary of what you found in terms of the content of your search. Could you research a longer paper using this as a research straegy/model?