Savannah Barnes Text Analysis

Introduction
As many of us can remember from our own high school careers, history can be a bit of a

dry topic. Unfortunately, because the vast wealth of information these classes are expected to

cover over the course of the 180 days school is in session, it is all to easy to fall into a trap of

memorizing dates, names and vocabulary words, without actually conveying any of the main

ideas required to understand the context of why what we are studying matters and how it falls

into the scheme of why things are the way they are.

While taking a look at a sophomore level US History Book, the 2018 edition of National

Geographic’s America: Through The Lens, it is easy to imagine a students brain shutting down

just by the overwhelming size of this book. Though it is just larger than your average sheet of

paper, this book is two inches thick, 1252 pages and weighs in at a whopping 6.2 pounds, (for the

sake of comparison, the laptop used to type this analysis weighs only 2.8 pounds). Across these

1252 pages, there are 31 chapters, and these 31 chapters aim to cover from THE BEGINNING to

THE PRESENT of US History. Uhm, excuse me, what?!

There is no way to effectively cover this massive span of years in this limited number of

pages, but at the same time, it should be acknowledged that over 1200 pages is a ludicrous

number of pages for a single subject high school text book. Essentially, students are given these

overwhelmingly massive books, and walk away with only the light glazing of information

covering a plethora of topics that will only convey the barest of understanding of the key

concepts, events and figures that made our world the way it is today.

For the sake of this analysis, I am going to focus on a single chapter, specifically Chapter

25, which is meant to cover the civil rights movement over the years of 1954-1964. The chapter

spans from pages 892 – 925, and is divided into two sections: Roots of the Movement and The
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Movement Gathers Force. These sections are then divided into subsections that attempt to cover

an entire aspect of the era such as 1.2 Resistance Through the Arts (2 pages), 1.4 American

Voices: Thurgood Marshall (2 pages), and 2.2 Martin Luther King, Jr., and a Growing Movement

(4 pages).

Strengths
The text does have some helpful features such as your typical helping points of bolding

the text of any important name, and bolding and highlighting vocabulary words, with a simple

definition included in the text. There are many visuals to accompany the text and keep the

reading from appearing overwhelming, however the numerous images are also a weakness as

they take up about half of the space that is already limited. The book does attempt to introduce

primary sources, but they are heavily edited for space and only contain a small portion of the

original text, for example there are two paragraphs of John Lewis’s Speech at the March on

Washington, one paragraph from the Eight Alabama clergymen’s “A Call for Unity”, and another

single paragraph from Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”.

The biggest strength of this book could be the historical teaching questions that are

located on nearly every other page, but that would entirely depend on the class conversations and

feedback given by the teacher. Foe example, Section 1.3 asks ‘How did the court decisions in

Mendez, Sweatt and McLaurin affect the Brown ruling?’ This is a good question to get students

to think critically, but clarification, feedback or discussion with their teacher or their peers would

be crucial to ensure students were grasping the connections between the events, as the books

coverage just brushes the surface.

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Weaknesses
This is an important 10 years of American history, and only 33 pages are dedicated to

this chapter. Of these 33 pages, the first 10 pages have an entire assortment of minimally

explained civil rights events, such as two pages dedicated to gay rights, one page dedicated to the

rights of the disabled, one half of a page to the desegregation of education, another half to the

Edmund Pettus bridge with a very vague summary, and three whole paragraphs explaining the

March on Washington. The last two pages of the chapter are dedicated to review. That leaves 21

pages to explain 10 years of civil rights struggles in meaningful ways that will allow students to

comprehend the events and connect it to them to the other ones described in this chapter.

Unfortunately, about half of the space in these 21 pages is filled with various photos of

the period. The first two pages of this chapter is a double spread of a black and white image from

1963 showing a not particularly interesting candid shot of the African American Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staging a sit-in to protest racial segregation in Atlanta, GA.

There is also a short quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, who is noted as a civil right leader. 22 pages

later, there are three paragraphs giving the barest summaries for both: one dedicated to the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and two dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer. There is

one page for Emmett Till. His story is reduced to an undated photo of him, one photo of his

mother crying over his casket at his funeral, and three paragraphs. You cannot effectively tell this

poor boy’s story in three paragraphs; the book does not even mention that he was murdered over

an alleged whistle to a white woman, a whistle the woman would wind up admitting to making

up decades later. By over summarizing, context is lost. In history, context is everything.

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Assumptions
Due to the lack of depth or detail to any topic in this chapter, it might be easy for

someone to assume that the fight for civil rights was not entirely necessary. From the pictures in

this text and using just the captions to go along with them, the book offers a very vanilla

representation of the trials and tribulations experienced by people of color during these years. A

smoking bus is the only reference to the damage done by the KKK, and the only image of harm

being actively done is a 1963 image of the Birmingham Fire Department hosing down protesters.

Still the majority of images present in this chapter suggest a much less turbulent fight for civil

rights; so many men in suits give the air of the fight being all political instead of the fight for

basic human rights that it was.

Teaching
To effectively teach a unit on civil rights using this book, it would be vital to bring in

other sources to supplement learning. Fortunately, (yet sadly) this period is recent enough that

there are not only plenty of archived newspaper articles, but there are also news broadcasts,

speech recordings, and even personal interviews available to give more accurate perspectives of

the common experiences and popular opinions of the time. Particularly on a unit focusing on

civil rights, it is important to add a variety of voices to ensure your students finish the unit with

an accurate understanding of what civil rights protesters were fighting for. By adding full

transcripts from speeches or even recordings of the speeches themselves from various civil rights

leaders and politicians, students can get a better understanding of what the passion involved.

“Selma” or “Till” could be shown in class to add understanding and help connecting events and

people. Popular songs from colored artists could be listened to and analyzed for meaning and

context. Students could compare Victor H. Green’s The Negro Motorist Green-Book with a book

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meant for white travelers in the same period. There are tons of options, and it is vital to choose at

least a few to supplement the monotonous tone and vague details of the book.

Conclusion
Textbooks, like any other tool or resource, are what you make of them. Though they are

often cramming too much information into too few of pages, textbooks mark a good starting

point for learning students. On their own, textbooks contain too many topics to offer any true

depth of understanding, especially when it comes to sensitive and divisive topics such as racism

and civil rights. However, when paired with additional resources and guided discussions,

textbooks can serve as an overview and the additional resources, particularly if they are from

multiple perspectives, can offer the depth and detail needed for students to get a more complete

and well-rounded understanding.

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References

National Geographic School Publishing, & Incorporated. (2018). U. S. history: America Through

the Lens.

Appendix

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