19 John Spencer Bassett, A Short History of the United States (New York:
Macmillan, 1923), 502.
20 The treatment of Harpers Ferry in the current Holt American Nation finally
gets beyond this language and does not question Brown’s sanity.
21 See Benjamin Quarles, The Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969), 244.
22 Pathways simply never mentions that Brown was religious.
23 See Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood, for a full account of Brown’s
acts.
24 The American Pageant comes the closest, with substantial treatment of
religions as social institutions and some discussion of their ideas. Otherwise, I
agree with Robert Bryan’s assessment, History, Pseudo-History, Anti-History:
How Public School Textbooks Treat Religion (Washington, D.C.: Learn, Inc.,
1984), 3, that after the Pilgrims, Christianity has no historical presence in
American history textbooks. See also Paul Gagnon, Democracy’s Untold
Story: What World History Textbooks Neglect (Washington, D.C.: American
Federation of Teachers, 1987); Charles C. Haynes, Religion in American
History (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development, 1990); and William F. Jasper, “America’s Textbooks Are
Censored in Favor of the Left,” in Lisa Orr, ed., Censorship: Opposing
Viewpoints (San Diego: Greenhaven, 1990), 154-59.
25 Right-wing textbook critics are rightly incensed by this; as one of Mel
Gabler’s reviewers put it, criticizing Life and Liberty, “Obviously, the
Publishers are not threatened by admitting the Arapaho were religious—so
why not the notable [non-Indian] Americans past and present?” (untitled
critique by Deborah L. Brezina [n.p., typescript distributed by Mel Gabler’s
Educational Research Analysts, 1993], 7). Unfortunately, Gabler’s reviewers
want only positive things said about religion, and mainly about their religion,
Christianity; thus they attack another textbook for mentioning that Benjamin
Franklin was a Deist.
26 Paul M. Angle, Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates
of 1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 41.
27 The new edition of The American Pageant includes a well-chosen
paragraph in which Lincoln agrees with Douglas that whites should be