Madisen Huffmann

Diversity and Power

24 January 2019

1. Write down who edited, authored and published the textbook, and what their backgrounds are,
and where the text was printed. Where does each person work and live? Who employs them and
for what sort of work?
• I could not find the author but the editor and publisher was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. I went to their page and found that the women who is the Chief Learning Officer is
named Rose Else-Mitchell, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford and a
master’s degree from the University of Sydney in Australia. She currently works in New York City.
2. What sources did the author(s) use to inform their history writing, and how do you know?
• I couldn’t find any sources because the textbook I used was online, and I could not access the
annotations.
3. What is your best sense of what motivated the author and editor of your textbook as they worked
on the passage you selected? What information, language choice, signs or choices do you see in
the text that give you a sense of their motivations behind writing about New World slavery?\
• I think the authors tried to justify slavery or sugar coat it. There is a large part where it talks about
how Muslim rulers and other Africans were the first to enslave people, as if to say “it wasn’t just
white people!” It also talks about how in some societies, the slaves could even join the army which
they show as a privilege, but I wonder if the enslaved people saw it as a privilege or if they thought
they were being forced into fighting a war. There is another section called “a harsh life” that talks
about (obviously) the harsh lives enslaved people lived but it is only five sentences and does not
dive into detail. It says they lived in huts, worked in fields, and sometimes suffered beatings.
Depending on which age this textbook was aimed at (I think middle school), I feel like some more
details would have led to a better understanding of how bad slavery really was for those involved.
4. How are gender, race, class and nation represented in your text? What questions do you have
about their representation (or lack thereof)?
• There is quite a bit about nation and class when they talk about the history of slavery. It mentions
how the smaller, poor villages in Africa were the ones left unprotected and usually ended up being
attacked and taken by slave traders. It also talks about how different nations (closer to the coast)
were more likely to have its citizens be sold into slavery because of accessibility to trade routes. It
does not mention gender, which I thought was interesting because it does talk about how some
enslaved people would join the army...We know that historically women couldn’t join the military
in that time period so what happened to the women that were enslaved? Were they just stuck there
forever because they didn’t get the chance to join the military?
5. What do you think Walter Johnson or James Loewen would notice in the passage you selected, and
what do you think they would say about it?
• I’m going to talk about Loewen’s thoughts because I found his text much more engaging. There
are a couple of parts in his reading that stand out to me in relation to the textbook I chose. One is
 when he says “Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white
Americans, or with the United States as a whole.” I thought that was such a strong statement but
it’s so true. I barely learned about slavery in my schools, and then when I looked back at the
textbook I found online I noticed right away that everything was sort of covered in a happy glow
without acknowledging that slavery was not “uncaused, a tragedy, but rather a wrong perpetuated
by some people on others” as Loewen also says in the text. I think the particular part he would
notice is when the textbook describes enslaved people’s lives as living in huts and working in the
fields, like condemned farm hands instead of like people whose entire lives have been stolen.
6. For section on Friday: What, if anything, would you like to revise in your selection and why?
What would you want to keep the same – and why?
• I think I would like to revise the part where they spend several paragraphs discussing how Africans
were the first people to enslave other Africans. To me, it seems like they are trying to justify white
people building an entire society and institution based around slavery by saying, “well they did it
first so it was okay for us to do it, too,” when in reality they were two very different types of slavery
and one did not lead to the other. European settlers made a racial choice to enslave those with a
different skin color and we need to acknowledge that it was driven by racism and not just a trend
that everyone in the world did so that makes it okay.
7. For section on Friday: What criteria do educators use when they make choices about history
education, and what criteria are most important to you? Why do these criteria matter-?
• I think educators choose events that they deem most important not only in our history but also
that have had important effects on the present. I think that this is a good way to make decisions
but I want diversity. If there is a panel of people trying to write a textbook, I do not want straight
white men only on the panel- we need people of color, LGBTQA+ people, native people, women,
immigrants, etc, because our own cultures and life experiences shape what we feel is most
important today and in history, so in order to get an accurate, representative picture of the US, we
need diversity. Also with diversity, it becomes easier to hold each other accountable for our
decisions because we see things with a different point of view so one person may realize when
something is problematic that others may not.