Schoolchildren saved from ‘blighted’ Yankee texts

“In 1863, the [Rockingham County] North Carolina ‘authoress’ Marinda Branson Moore published The Geographical Reader for the Dixie Children, the first textbook to teach the geography of the seceded South. After the Civil War began, such primers were ‘both a practical and a patriotic necessity’ for the Confederacy, as the historians O. L. Davis, Jr. and Serena Rankin Parks soberly wrote in 1963, as Southern schoolteachers saw the Northern-printed textbooks in supply as ‘blighted with by Yankee biases and inaccuracies’….

“Moore explains that the Northern states are ‘mad’ on the subject of slavery. How many Southern children learned from this geography book? Enough to support two editions before the end of war in 1865….”

— From “How Women Mapped the Upheaval of 19th Century America” by Laura Bliss at CityLab (March 23)

 

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