History by Quota?

IN THE SCHOOLS History by Quota? Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman ver since the 1960s, textbook publishers have tried to satisfy demands E for greater representation made on behalf of blacks, American Indians, women, and other groups. To measure the effects of this movement on leading high school American history textbooks, we have employed a quantitative content analysis of the historical characters those texts feature. In an earlier Academic Questions article, "Filler Feminism in High School History" (Winter 1991-92), we presented our findings about the representation of women in American history textbooks of the 1980s. In this article, we examine the changes in the textbook representation of two racial minorities--blacks and American Indians--from the 1940s through the 1980s. After describing our methods and presenting the results of our research, we will discuss the impact these changes have had on high school instruction in American history. Method Leading history textbooks were identified this way. In some states, texts are selected at the state-level for the entire state; these are called adoption states. In nonadoption states, texts are chosen by school districts. We asked the education departments of each adoption state and the 120 largest school districts in nonadoption states to list their most popular textbooks per decade from the 1940s through the 1980s. 1 For each decade we chose the three texts most frequently mentioned, for a total of fifteen books (see the Appendix for complete bibliographical information on each book). Reference to any of these texts is by the last name of its first author; for example, The Rise of the American Nation, by Lewis Todd and Merle Curti, is henceforth called Todd. Different editions of the same text are distinguished by their respective date of publication. Our results are based on the systematic coding of individual characters from each of the fifteen books. 2 We constructed the coding scheme to minimize Robert Lerner is assistant director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063. Althea K. Nagai is senior research associate at the center, and Stanley Rothman is the Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Government and director of the center. This article is part of the center's study of leadership and social change in the United States. 70 Academic Questions/Fall 1992 the tendency of coders to introduce their own interpretations when coding characters. This was done as follows. First, our trained coders were unaware of our hypotheses and unfamiliar with our general paradigm or other research. Almost all did not even know the topic of inquiry, except in the vague sense of studying high school history books. In order to be counted and coded, textbook characters had to be identifiable in a picture, be treated in a column-inch or more of text, or be the primary subject of a paragraph. Coders then listed a series of traits for each character, including visual portrayal; textual portrayal in terms of the number of column inches of text; sex, race, ethnicity, religion, occupation(s), age, and personal income; spheres of activities engaged in (from a total of twenty-two categories); actual activities and actions; and every adjectival and adverbial phrase used to describe the character. A book's overall evaluation of each character was also coded as positive, somewhat positive, negative, somewhat negative, mixed, or neutral, s The content analysis scheme underwent two major and several minor revisions before reaching its final form. Coders then worked on a practice chapter, which was corrected and discussed with them before the actual coding began. Lastly, to ensure coding reliability (a sine qua non of quantitative content analysis), a different group of coders recoded a random sample of chapters whose results were compared to the original group's. Using Scott's Pi (a commonly used measure of reliability between coders), the average achieved reliability between our coding groups was 0.81, an excellent result according to the content analysis literature. 4 Changes in Minority Representation Over the decades studied, we discovered a rapid increase, both absolute and proportional, in the coverage of racial minorities. In the 1940s, Dred Scott is the only black to receive enough coverage to be coded (Wirth, 1943). The number of codable blacks increases to seven in the 1950s, twenty in the 1960s, fifty-three in the 1970s, and ninety-three in the 1980s. Of the total number of codable characters, blacks constitute less than .01 percent in the 1950s, 2 percent in the 1960s, 6 percent in the 1970s, and 8 percent in the 1980s. While the 1980s saw a marked increase over the preceding decade in the number of blacks coded (75 percent), it saw an even greater increase (354 percent) in the number of American Indians coded. There were three codable Indians in the 1940s, seven each in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven in the 1970s, and thirty-nine in the 1980s. ~ The way in which characters are presented in the textbooks is particularly important. Being pictured gives a character special prominence. Generally, about one in three white characters appears in a picture alone or in both text and picture. Since the 1960s, however, roughly two in three blacks are pictured. Women are also more likely than men to be pictured. Of all Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman 71 characters, black women are the most likely and white men the least likely to be pictured. TABLE 1 Changes in Character Presentation Text Only Pictures Number of (%) (%) Characters Pre-Sixties Male Black 63 38 8 White 61 39 1267 Female Black 0 0 0 White 41 59 46 Sixties Male Black 41 59 17 White 65 35 762 Female Black 0 100 3 White 36 64 25 Post-Sixties Male Black 52 48 119 White 67 33 1580 Female Black 30 70 23 White 43 57 168 Before the 1960s, white women were more likely to appear in pictures than in text alone; white men and black men both conformed to the general rule of appearing more often in text alone than in pictures; and there were no black female characters. By the 1960s the percentage of pictured white women rose from 59 to 64 percent. But now they were joined in this favored category by black men, 59 percent of whom are pictured, as are 100 percent of the black women. After the 1960s, this pattern moderates slightly, but still 70 percent of black women, 57 percent of white women, and 48 percent ofblack men are pictured, as are only 33 percent of white men. A special use of pictures deserves mention. A number of textbooks feature highlighted portraits of outstanding individuals. These inserts, usually consis- 72 Academic Questions/Fall 1992 ting of a picture with a biographical sketch, have changed even more radically than other visual and textual portrayals. For example, Canfield (1952) contains sixteen "Picture Biographies." These persons are all white men except for Jane Addams; nearly half portray famous presidents. By 1985, however, the bias of such portraits is against the native-born white Protestant male. Wood (1985) features "American Portraits," consisting of thirty individuals "who have contributed to American life. Some are famous. Others are not." Ten portrayals are of women, seven are of minority males, and eight are of immigrant males (two are Jewish but not identified as such); only five are of native-born white Protestant males. The affirmative action implicit in the selection of portraits continues to increase. For example, the current revision of Todd (1990) contains forty- three American profiles. Fourteen are of blacks or American Indians, and seventeen are of women, while the remaining seventeen are of white males. Of these, one is a portrait of Holocaust survivors; another, of Alexander Graham Bell, focuses on his work with deaf persons; a third, a profile of Vietnam veterans, pictures the Vietnam War Memorial. 6 It should perhaps be noted that altering the racial and sexual mix of pictures and featured portraits is an easy way for textbook authors to meet the changing standards of textbook adoption committees, as it does not require rewriting the text. However, one consequence of this is a growing discrepancy in emphasis between the text and the accompanying illustrations. (See "Filler Feminism" for a more detailed discussion of the role of textbook guidelines in shaping their content.) Since textual alterations are a relatively expensive and time-consuming process for both author and publisher, changes in the amount of textual space characters of different types receive is an especially revealing indicator of their importance. For the period covered in our study, on average white characters receive 6.19 column inches of space while black characters receive 2.55 inches. Breakdown by decade reveals trends similar to those described above. The average per white character for the 1960s is 6.72 inches, while the black average is 1.53-a ratio of 4.39. In the 1970s, the ratio falls to less than 2 to 1--7.36 inches for whites and 4.06 for blacks--a drop of 250 percent. The balance shifts back somewhat in the 1980s: 4.74 inches for whites versus 1.95 for blacks, a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. Another measure of importance is the number of activities a coded character is described as engaging in. Of the twenty-two categories of activity, the average number ascribed per character is 2.41 for whites and 1.71 for blacks. As with the amount of text allotted to each character, the white to black ratio dropped substantially in the 1970s to 1.24 (2.38/1.92) from 1.85 (2.59/1.40) in the 1960s, and then increased slightly in the 1980s to 1.32 (2.2/1.67).

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