rss feedNOTICE: Textbook History Has Moved
posted by Ronald Ladouceur on 2010.06.28, under Home
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New and improved site. Same familiar name: Textbook History.
Index
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Race, Art and Evolution in the Rocket Age
The sculpted busts of “early man” by J. H. McGregor, and the paintings of Neanderthal flint workers and Cro-Magnon artists by Charles R. Knight, alchemized imaginary beasts of centuries past into icons of progress that carried the imprimatur of science. But the narrative they presented was conflicted from the start.
If Kinsey’s Textbook Could Talk …
In this essay, I build on a dissertation by Donna J. Drucker on Alfred C. Kinsey, the famous sexologist, to see what a deep reading of the scientist’s high school textbook, An Introduction to Biology, might offer us in understanding both Kinsey the enthusiastic if overreaching entomologist, and Kinsey the groundbreaking if complexly motivated behavioral scientist.
Eugenics in 20th Century Biology Textbooks
An analysis of the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in the American high school biology curriculum based on review of 80 textbooks published between 1907 and 1969. Includes graph, database and notes.
Review: Galileo Goes to Jail by Ronald L. Numbers (ed.)
Ronald L. Numbers has dedicated himself to this Sisyphean task of making sure we don’t commit the sin of relying on myths when doing history or promoting our worldview. A review of his latest book.
Haeckel’s Embryos in High School and College
Ernst Haeckel’s embryos were a common fixture in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from at least the mid-1930s on. Generations of students took away the incorrect but easy to accept and generally cool idea that we pass through a fish-like stage, complete with gill slits, on our way to becoming human. Article | Database
20th Century Bio Textbooks Reviewed and Ranked
A database of 80 American high school biology textbooks. Includes observational notes and rankings relative to the topic of evolution.
The Weight of the Moon or How a Single Textbook Skewed Our View of History
In the 1950s and 1960s, Moon, Mann and Otto’s Modern Biology was the most popular biology textbook in the country, commanding upwards of 50% of the market. It was also among the most retrograde and out of date.
The Topic of Evolution in Secondary Schools Revisited
An analysis of the relative priority of the topic of evolution in high school textbooks between 1907 and 1969.
Happy Birthday, Origin
As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, I thought I’d take the opportunity to note that the image of Darwin we share today, that tired looking but steadfast rock solid symbol of science, dates back only about 50, not 150 years.
After Scopes, Black Was The New Grey
After the Scopes, how many compromises were required to twist biology into something a conservative Tennessee or Texas textbook committee would approve?
Biology Textbooks Before Scopes (Updated)
Index and analysis of American high school biology textbooks published before 1923 now available via Google Books.
Kroeber and Wolff’s Excellent Adventures
Published in 1938, Adventures With Livings Things was one of the most comprehensive, most far-sighted American high school biology textbooks of the century. It was also one of the most challenging. And in terms of commercial success and influence, perhaps one of the most disappointing.
Adventure! Domination! Biology!
The image on the left is from a popular college textbook from the 1940s. The one on the right is from a Men’s Adventure magazine, otherwise known as a “sweat” or “armpit” pulp, from the 1950s.
In this article I suggest, despite their quite different contexts, these images served a common purpose.
Reform Eugenics and the Gender Bomb
Amram Scheinfeld’s 1939 You and Heredity was a bestseller, a hit not only with the general public, but also with life scientists.
Review: Three Generations, No Imbeciles by Paul A. Lombardo
Paul A. Lombardo’s history of Buck v. Bell, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, is a terrific telling of case of Carrie Buck, a young woman sterilized by Virginia in 1927.
H. W. Conn’s ‘Communistic’ Challenge to Eugenics
After authoring Biology (1912), an innovative college level textbook, microbiologist and Wesleyan professor Herbert William Conn turned his attention to the grander task of subsuming eugenics within a broader and more social evolutionary ideology.
The Evolution of Textbooks: 1930s Edition
The 1930s were a time of remarkable innovation in the development of high school biology.
Modern Biology in the BSCS Era
The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) was able to use its post-Sputnik mandate, and $6,000,000 Cold War dollars, to force evolution back into American biology textbooks by developing its own, setting a standard for science content its commercial competitors were forced to follow.
Or so the story goes.
Making Sense of Bentley Glass
In its obituary, the Washington Post described Bentley Glass (1906-2005) as a “peripatetic figure in the 1950s and 1960s,” a man who seemed to be everywhere and advising everyone. In other obituaries Glass was described as “provocative” and “outspoken.” Editors of course made note of Glass’ more controversial comments, such as his 1971 statement that, “No parents will in that future time have the right to burden society with a malformed or mentally incompetent child,” a remark that the New York Times wrote, “is still regularly deplored by opponents of abortion.” Other notices, such as the one that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, labeled Glass more forgivingly as a “rabble-rouser,” and noted, “Of all his pronouncements, none permeated the cultural lexicon more than his 1962 prediction that cockroaches would be the sole survivors of nuclear war.”
The Day Eugenics Died
It came as a bit of a surprise to find that many American high school and college biology textbooks continued to discuss eugenics as if it were a non-controversial idea well into the rock-and-roll era.
The Nervous Icon – Part II
The image in question is a stylized view of the human central nervous system. It appeared in what is arguably the very first modern American biology textbook, George W. Hunter’s 1907 Elements of Biology published by the American Book Company. This same image was copied, revised and republished repeatedly in textbooks into the 1960s.
Bentley Glass’ 1949 Introduction
A search on Abebooks turned up a 1949 Houghton Mifflin text I’d never heard of, The World of Life by Wolfgang F. Pauli. Curious, I ordered it.
Classroom Biology: Before and After the Bomb
Biology textbook authors in the first decades of the twentieth century helped undercut democracy and shore up the status quo by “confirming” suspicions that the “strongest” weren’t breeding, the “weakest” weren’t dying and that workers who did not know their genetically-determined place were a threat to the social order.
The Nervous Icon – Part I
It is classical in pose and commands its stage. A black silhouette shot through with delicate white lines on a page dressed only with a pedestal-like caption that reads, “The central cerebro-spinal nervous system.”
Marston Bates’ Moment of Zen
Though Rachel Carson is usually credited for raising the public’s awareness of ecology, it was Marston Bates’ 1960 book, The Forest and the Sea, not Silent Spring, that made ecology a household word.
The Case of the Disappearing Darwin
It’s a powerful symbol of capitulation: the straight on, serious portrait of Charles Darwin, the wizened, white bearded author of the Origin of Species and father of modern biology, was stripped from the frontispiece of a popular high school textbook, replaced by, of all things, a cartoon of the human digestive tract.
Alfred Kinsey: Teaching Eugenics and Evolution
This excerpt from Kinsey’s text, Methods in Biology, provides an interesting glimpse into how a scientist in the 1930s counseled prospective teachers on how to navigate potential issues when handling the “related” topics of eugenics and evolution.
James Reid, Ella Thea Smith and G. G. Simpson
In his 1969 autobiography, An Adventure in Textbooks, Reid discussed how he helped Ella Thea Smith bring her homemade textbook, complete with its thorough discussion of the theory of evolution, to market in 1938.
“Darwin and the Textbooks (1966) by Peter D. Miller
Miller’s thesis is interesting as it was among the first papers to suggest that biology textbook authors and publishers progressively downplayed the theory of evolution in response to pressure from religious fundamentalists.
Discovered! Ella Thea Smith’s First Textbook
Downloadable PDF of Ella Thea Smith’s 1932 mimeographed and hand bound textbook.
