Textbooks and Culture Wars: An essay review of Charles Eagles, Civil rights culture wars: The fight over a Mississippi textbook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 298. ISBN 9781469631158.

Abstract

The politics of collective memory, over what counts as “official knowledge,” is crucial in education. With its primary focus on the politics of memory and how this works in the politics of school knowledge as its primary focus, Civil Rights Culture Wars gives us a rich historical picture of this process as it played out in a significant battle over a specific textbook in Mississippi. As some readers may already know, there have been a large number of interesting case studies of textbook controversies over the years, as well as a long history of studies that critically focus on the political and educational issues surrounding textbooks. As Eagles documents in great detail, this book became a center of ideological conflict and many conservative groups were clear that they would seek to block its approval. The conflict over the book in the courts, in the press, and in government agencies took years. There were defeats, partial victories, and then ultimately a vindication. Even though the implications of his analysis to more general issues of political and cultural theory are always there, Eagles’s account is not about the abstraction called the “state.” It reads more like an anguished drama, filled with real characters, biographies, and movements, from the authors of the textbook themselves, to state legislators, to educational administrators and state textbook adoption commission members, to judges, to members of the public who held varied political positions on the battle over inclusion and exclusion, over the epistemological fog, amnesia and memory, and so much more.