19 TH CENTURY US HISTORY SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH
The article looks at the use and perception by contemporaries of the 19 th century US history school textbooks during an escalation of the political confrontation between the North and the South in 1850s. For historical reasons, the center of schoolbook production in the ﬁ rst half of the 19 th century was free, and industrial New England and northern authors considered it to be their duty to inculcate youth with patriotic feelings and faith in the exceptional nature of this country, by which they meant superiority of economic and sociocultural institutions of the North. It lead to an outbreak in the South of an information war against the northern school-books, which were viewed by the southern intelligentsia as a threat to the preservation of the existing social and economic structure, and most notably slavery. More-over, the proponents of the view tried to prove to their countrymen that the production of new “reliable” textbooks that would aﬃ rm the righteousness of the southern values and beliefs was the only means that could guarantee the future wellbeing of the South. The study, however, revealed that the majority of the southern population including teachers and political leaders did not see any serious danger in the northern books and refused to support the idea. Thus, we cannot speak of the southern school textbooks as a separate text corpus.