Missing Colonies in American Myths of Slavery: Where Is the “Deep North” in Sociology Textbooks?

Textbooks and Knowledge

This study is an exercise in reflexive sociology, or a “sociology of sociology” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), with public implications. As Pierre Bourdieu (1993) theorized, the academy is one among other institutions (or “fields”) through which societies manage and disseminate cultural products. Bourdieu specifies how taken-for-granted knowledge (“doxa”) animates academic practice:

In fact, what circulates between contemporary philosophers, . . . , are not only canonical texts, but a whole philosophical doxa carried along by intellectual rumour . . . by academic routine and perhaps above all by school manuals, . . . which perhaps do more than anything else to constitute the “common sense” of an intellectual generation (emphasis added). (Bourdieu 1993:30)

The influence of those school manuals on lay, public spheres is reciprocal: a philosophical doxa, or presumed, hegemonic knowledge, reflects producers’ geographies and epochs, reinforcing orthodoxy. In the case at hand, is there a commonly recognized doxa in sociology textbooks about Southern slavery?

Sociology and the lay public impact one another, and the introductory course is critical. John Zipp labels the introductory sociology course the “public face of sociology,” enrolling an estimated 1.5 to 2 million plus American students annually (Zipp 2012:304). Furthermore, it is highly likely that Intro is the only sociology class that these students will ever take (Clark and Nunes 2008:227). Standard textbooks are assigned in approximately 90 percent of college courses (Hamilton and Form 2003), in the vast majority of introductory sociology courses (Manza, Sauder, and Wright 2010:272), and in 88.6 percent of high-school sociology courses (DeCesare 2007:183). In contrast, research-intensive universities generally require monographs rather than textbooks (Manza et al. 2010:297).

Given that textbooks operate as “voices of the disciplines” (Issitt 2004:688), and introductory textbooks are key pedagogical devices that expose students to sociology (Keith and Ender 2004; Perrucci 1980:40), they carry authority as knowledge gatekeepers: “As one of the most common educational materials students are assigned in sociology courses, [the introductory textbook] represents a very public record of what the general field of sociology believes to be true” (Featherstone and Sorrell 2007:84). Nevertheless, textbooks are vulnerable to the sway of current mainstream narratives (Tischler 1988). Clearly, authors have content control, but the publishing industry’s supply-and-demand norms help shape the final product (Manza et al. 2010).

Furthermore, tensions between textbook narratives and state-of-the-art research are legion. Research by Richard F. Hamilton and William H. Form (2003:693) uncovered “‘two sociologies,’ that of the journals and monographs and that of the introductory textbooks.” ¹ New editions do update theories, research, and examples, but leave others largely intact (Best and Schweingruber 2003:99). Admittedly, the vast myriad of topics in an Introductory textbook constrain the depth into which authors might delve and therefore are “notoriously inept at wrestling with the intricacies of a specialty” (Lynch and Bogen 1997:484) given publisher-imposed limitations and page-length restrictions (Tischler 1988).

Mnemonic Socialization and Public Sociology

The research at hand asks whether textbooks portray slavery as regionally bound. For example, one challenge to continued racist patterns would be a reminder that multiple American regions bear the responsibility. Collective memory scholarship speaks to this task, by investigating a doxa’s birth, maturation, and reproduction (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011). Based in Maurice Halbwachs’s ([1941, 1952] 1992) theory that memories are socially embedded, sociologists document how collective memories live on through such social institutions (or fields) as the media, family, religion, and education. Eviatar Zerubavel (1996) labels these “remembrance environments,” in which “mnemonic socialization” takes place (Zerubavel 1996:286). ² As Sturken explains, “collective remembering . . . provides cultural identity and gives a sense of the importance of a past” (Sturken 1997:1).

However, this process invariably involves negotiation and debate. Sturken suggests that “memory and forgetting are co-constitutive processes; each is essential to the other’s existence” (Sturken 1997:2). Iwona Irwin-Zarecka (1994:6) suggests that this memory-forgetting dynamic takes place through “framing devices,” used to present historical stories through such cultural products as films and memorial sites. An author’s or creator’s interpretive angle acts as an entry point into historical truth. When a group intentionally omits aspects of their own historical stories, they perform what Eviator Zerubavel calls “mnemonic decapitation” (Zerubavel 2003:93). Cedric J. Robinson ([1983] 2000:4–5) has charged that Europeans conveniently forgot and ignored millennia of African history.

In response to such forgetting via framing or decapitation, mnemonic text/site creators talk back to the forgotten and narrowly framed histories across a range of interpretive and performative platforms (Pearce 2018). Such critical, resistant narratives, labeled “counter-memory” by Michel Foucault (1980), dispel myths and question institutional filters (Sturken 1997). For academic fields such as history, critiques result in “revisionist” works, due to “new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time” (McPherson 2003).

Regarding the subject at hand, revisionism involves a conversation with stated national foundational values. There is a role to be played by excluded African American voices and the critical historian, to reorient mnemonic socialization. Furthermore, the mnemonic socializing agent of the sociology course is a potential platform for (critical) public sociology, defined by Michael Burawoy and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (2001) as “ . . . a sociology that is oriented toward major problems of the day . . . ” (p. 2). Burawoy identifies the classroom as such a platform: “[t]here is one public that will not disappear before we do—our students. Every year we create approximately 25,000 new BAs, who have majored in sociology. What does it mean to think of them as a potential public?” (Burawoy 2005:9). The textbook is a key mnemonic socializing agent for this potential public. We now explore the connection between the textbook and collective memory.

Race and Slavery in Textbook and Public Memory

Here, we review relevant scholarship on collective memories of race and enslavement, in history and sociology textbooks and public memorial sites. Textbook critiques of race and representation of African Americans began as early as 1891, with A School History of the Negro Race in America, in which formerly enslaved Edward Austin Johnson uncovered explicit and implicit textbook messages of Black inferiority—in books used across geographic regions. His message was largely unheard, as Carter G. Woodson (1933, 1936) continued a similar charge 42 years later, with The Mis-education of the Negro, alleging that Eurocentric education and absence of African or African American history was failing Black students, and proffering his own The African Background Outlined. More recently, expanding on such efforts, Joseph Moreau (2003:138–41) chronicled racialized nationalism in those first mass-produced school history books of the 1820s, finding conflations of “race” with “nation,” an absence of enslaved African Americans as subjects, and explicit “White superiority” wording as the 19th century progressed. Popular schoolbook author and Columbia University professor David Muzzey, for example, wrote that “Negroes are, as a race, perhaps centuries behind the whites in civilization” (cited in Moreau 2003:167) in the history schoolbook that dominated the market for 65 years (F. FitzGerald 1979:59). These textbooks—used across regions—expanded, rather than removed, white-supremacist content with new editions.

Although Johnson’s and Woodson’s critiques built a base for revisionist histories, the Black empowerment movements of the 1960s pushed the agenda forward (King 2012:173; Moreau 2003). Nevertheless, hegemonic history narratives continued to prevail. In her 1979 book America Revisited, for example, Frances FitzGerald (1979:34–35) exposed ideological messages in American primary and secondary school history books that reflected each era’s political culture, influenced by state-level review boards, interest groups, and citizen organizations. The following year, Howard Zinn offered a corrective through the best-selling A People’s History of the United States (1980), starkly chronicling Southern slavery and Northern racism; however, this book would not replace standard mainstream textbooks. Among other key revisionist histories have been those by Molefi Kete Asante (1990), who re-situated people of African descent as historical agents. Despite these efforts, as sociologist James Loewen outlined in Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), American school textbooks have continued to whitewash the unseemly sides of American history in the service of heroic myths of origin.

Sociology textbooks have also been critically assessed for blind spots regarding race, reflecting early social-scientific essentialisms. In 1939, for instance, Brewton Berry compared race across 20 Introductory textbooks, yielding no consensus on the term’s use or definitions, many of which were vague. He viewed Park and Burgess as exceptions, who critiqued existing racial typological categories as arbitrary and subjective, based in European colonial conquests (Berry 1939). In addition to these critiques of the concepts of race, sociologist Kathleen J. Fitzgerald (2012:338) charged that descriptions of racism in the subfield of Sociology of Race/Ethnicity textbooks needed revising, explaining that the books “ . . . generally avoid the issue of white privilege, are often ahistorical, and usually adopt the use of the passive voice in accounting for racism . . . .” Therefore, “textbooks often fail to implicate the perpetrators of racism, generally whites, reinforcing the dominant ideology that American society reflects what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) has termed ‘racism without racists’” (Fitzgerald: 2012:338). Similarly, Earl Wright and Thomas C. Calhoun (2006) exposed the discipline’s history of excluding the lives of—and structural conditions faced by—Blacks as subjects of scientific study. And an implicit bias upholding white sociologists as key founders still permeates the discipline’s texts: Earl Wright’s (2012) analysis of introductory sociology textbooks found that Du Bois’s more holistic life work is given short shrift, and foundational contributions of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory to American sociology are absent. ³ Our study builds upon these works of reflexive sociology. At stake is a need for explicit textbook accounting of the historical depth of structural racism and the geographic breadth of racist agency.

Sociology textbooks have yet to be scrutinized for omissions of Northern slavery. Nonetheless, textbook revision on the history of slavery has its own history. For example, Henry Hughes ([1854] 1968), who authored the first American sociology textbook, defended Southern slavery in that volume (Manza et al. 2010) as did the author of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology article, 49 years later (Wright and Calhoun 2006:4). In this article, the author H. E. Belin (1903:266) stated that slavery would one day be recognized as “at once the most humane and the most practical method ever devised for ‘bearing the whiteman’s burden.’” By 1918, apologetics for Southern slavery were less visible, if evidenced by an American Journal of Sociology article that critically contrasted Southern philosophies of slavery with democratic principles, noting parallels to German nationalism (Dodd 1918). By 1940, a 953-page textbook by Ogborn Nimkoff (1940:321–23), Sociology, had no descriptions of slavery.

Early on, however, W. E. B. Du Bois ([1903] 2007, [1904] 2007) and Lester F. Ward (1906), among others, were pushing the field to forward racial equality. In fact, the system’s foundational status appeared in Du Bois’s 1899 book The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1995), which, according to Howard Winant “ . . . still stands, an entire century later, as a magisterial survey of the unique racial dementia of the United States: the country’s foundational involvement with African enslavement and the permanent consequences of that involvement” (Winant 2000:175). In his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois ([1903] 2007:169) stated: “My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds . . . ”, indicating New Netherland and Massachusetts. And in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America in 1904, Du Bois offered a historical account of slavery in the colonies. In 1935, Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 ([1935] 1998), detailing the transnational system of slavery and the fate of Blacks at the bottom of the economic pyramid of the American colonies.

In the field of history, Northern slavery has received less emphasis than the Southern system (Ross 2018). Howard Zinn’s 1980 tome, in fact, did not detail Northern slavery, despite Zinn’s self-awareness following his earlier Atlanta, Georgia residency: “The South is not a mutation born by some accident into the normal lovely American family. It has simply taken the national genes and done the most with them” (Zinn 1964:218). Historians who confront the transregional responsibility of slavery in the context of the interconnected Atlantic World have only emerged in recent decades (Linebaugh 2000).

Notably, textbooks collaborate as mnemonic socializing agents with other venues, including museums, reenactments, statues, memorials, and building nomenclature, as well as popular media. They mediate between their human creators (the actual mnemonic agents) and audiences, who become co-participants in meaning making and interpretation (Olick et al. 2011). Sociologists who have documented the landscapes and discourses of collective memorial representations of U.S. slavery find that such mnemonic materials reflected popular myths or glossed over historical detail, in line with hegemonic narratives of textbooks. James Loewen (1999), for example, found that Southern pro-Confederate markers lacked honest mentions of slavery, and the countless “Lost Cause” memorials/museums erected following Reconstruction reinforced White supremacy (see also P. G. Davis 2016:119–21). J. L. Eichstedt and S. Small (2002) studied the range of Southern plantation tours, from the conventional types, which either represented “symbolic annihilation” (no mentions of slavery) or “trivialization and deflection” (the “happy slave” myth). Among those that worked to revise such approaches were tours that presented either “segregation or marginalization” (honest, though marginalized, presentations of African American life) or “relative incorporation” (juxtaposing Black and White narratives). These first two conventional categories represent what scholars have dubbed the “magnolia myth,” which even present plantations as “slave free” (Butler 2001) designed for “edutainment,” while the final two types, according to Perry Carter, David Butler, and Derek H. Alderman (2014:549), “desentimentalize” the South. Eichstedt and Small (2002) found that Black-run tours juxtaposed accounts of harsh victimization with resilient agency.

Patricia Davis’s (2016:146–47) research on Southern presentations of slavery also uncovered examples of symbolic annihilation, noted a similar contrast between “Lost Cause” memorials/museums and African American revisions that emphasize their agency through a “black sectional consciousness”—this despite longstanding ambivalence by Black communities over revisiting the historical trauma (2016:10–11). In part to re-insert their fuller histories into Southern narratives, African Americans are reclaiming narratives in plantation tours, museums, and on digital sites to fully represent both trauma and resistance. Davis also found that memory revisionists did “de-territorialize” sectional identity beyond the South to confront open wounds. By revisiting histories of community resistance, they “work to destabilize assumptions of the urban North as the central site of resistant blackness and resituate the South as the primal scene for black subjectivity” (P. G. Davis 2016:151; see also Hoelscher 2012). Scholarship on Northern slavery tourism is nascent, given that there is yet little to deconstruct (Griswold 2013).

Atlantic-World /Northern Slavery: Shared Histories

Here, we briefly review historical scholarship that could inform textbook and public counter-narratives to de-territorialize the story. ⁴ From Europeans’ earliest years on the continent, colonists formed and sustained settlements by exploiting enslaved labor, detailed in Carter Woodson’s The Negro in America (1936) and Edgar McManus’s Black Bondage in the North (1973). The bulk of historical research on slavery has focused on Southern plantation slavery, however (Ross 2018:13). Recent decades have seen more public and academic exposés of slavery in the North (Anderson 2011:7; Blakey 2001; Manegold 2010), and other regions of the United States (Malakoff 2004). As this scholarship has revealed, Northern colonies were key participants in the Atlantic triangular trade in enslaving Africans (Benjamin 2009), served as ports and transfer points, and invested in Southern plantations and in the broader cross-Atlantic system economically (Ross 2018; Woodson 1936:258). Although numbers and proportions of enslaved individuals in the New England colonies did not rival the Southern colonies, large concentrations existed in cities, agricultural counties (Melish 1998:15), and coastal towns (McManus 1973:7).

Slavery likely commenced in Boston in 1624 (Dann and Seaton 2001:7–8) in New Netherland (later New York) in 1626 (McManus 1973:2–3), in Delaware by 1636 (Rodriguez 2007:3), in Pennsylvania by 1639 (Anderson 2011:7), and in New Hampshire by 1645 (McManus 1973:6), with the highest proportion of residents enslaved in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Connecticut also helped the African ivory trade prosper (Farrow, Lang, and Frank 2005). Massachusetts was the first to legalize slavery, in 1641, and Rhode Island in 1652 (McManus 1973:59). In 1678, a French merchant observed: “You may own Negroes and Negresses; there is not a House in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two” (Brown 1901:5). Simultaneously, during the 17th and 18th centuries, one-quarter of the New Amsterdam and New York labor force was enslaved (Blakey 2001:223) across construction, food service, domestic labor, and fishing. In the 1780s, in fact, an English migrant observed that “[i]n the vicinity of New York, every respectable family had slaves—negroes and négresses who did the drudgery” (White 1995:2). And in 1790, 40 percent of White households across the New York City vicinity had enslaved labor, exceeding the proportion in any Southern state (White 1995:2).

Across the 18th century, Northern colonies depended on sugar plantations of the Caribbean and grew food for the enslaved there (Dann and Seaton 2001:7–8). Storied abolitionist Sojourner Truth was enslaved from birth in Ulster County, New York, and her three children sold from her (Mabee and Mabee Newhouse 1993). According to David Brion Davis (2003:76–77), “[t]he fortune of New England manufacturers and New York merchants depended on a northward flow of cotton,” and Northern dependence on enslaved labor intensified as the region integrated further into the economy of the Atlantic world (Berlin 1998:177).

Northern states continued this economic dependence well into the 19th century as capitalism grew, encompassing “Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa” (Baptist 2016: xxiii). Simultaneously, the burgeoning capitalist/industrial revolution coincided with a domino pattern of manumissions, beginning with Vermont, in its initial 1777 constitution. However, entrenched slaveholding continued there until 1810 (Whitfield 2014). Christian church leaders were instrumental in both justifying slavery and in abolition movements, resulting in a rift between South and North. Historian Laura L. Mitchell (1998:138) argues, however, that Northern ministers supported a range of approaches to slavery, and even most abolitionists advocated gradual rather than immediate emancipation. Further, when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required Americans to return fugitives to their masters, many Northern theologians and ministers used biblical justification to admonish congregants to do so, in part to support the larger body of Christians in the Union (Mitchell 1998:151).

All Northern states had passed manumission laws by 1804, but many offered freedom gradually, extending slavery for decades; slavery continued in New Jersey until 1865 (Harper 2003). Historians dispute accounts of Northerners as largely devoted to slavery’s abolition, reporting that a common motive of New England abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries was to rid the region of Blacks and restore White homogeneity (Melish 1998:164). American public memory, however, has been more fixated on Northern states as Underground Railroad havens. According to Allegra di Bonaventura (2013), New Englanders intentionally erased the public memory of slavery in their region during the 19th century (see also Ross 2018:13).

Collective amnesia of the “Deep North” has continued into the present day. Historian Jason Sokol opines on the implications for public reckoning of regional racial responsibility:

Most Northerners behave as though they come from America writ large, rather than from a subsection of it. The North seems unremarkable. It holds no dark mystery, no agonies buried deep within . . . We like to think that the struggle for racial equality is tangential to Northern history . . . Northern history looms as a source of aspiration and inspiration. (Sokol 2014:A23)

Such assumptions reflect a collective perception of a moral boundary between North and South. In his book Slavery in the North (2018) Marc Howard Ross offers a parallel reflection: “I focus on where I have lived my entire life—the North—and ask why the history of slavery seems to be a deep, dark secret and a taboo subject for inclusion in history and collective memory” (Ross 2018:4).

Ross chronicles this history, along with new efforts by mnemonic agents to revise public memory. Among these efforts were a major 2005 exhibit on New York slavery by the New York Historical Society, a public memorial and visitor’s center at site of Manhattan’s 18th-century New York African Burial Ground, and Northern slavery histories narrated in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. ⁵

De-territorialization of collective memory of slavery is also evident in academia. Georgetown University has initiated a modicum of reparation payments to descendants of the enslaved that the university’s Jesuit leaders sold in 1838 (Pengelly 2019). As Craig Steven Wilder describes in Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, ivy-league universities across seven Northern states had trustees and donors who were “slaveholders,” used enslaved laborers to build and maintain campuses, received monies from the slave trade, and were integral to colonial expansion and conquest of indigenous lands (Wilder 2013). Wilder argues that “the academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” (Wilder 2013:11). Such revisionism is integral to a critical examination of sociology textbooks, given that the discipline developed within leading universities, whose socially embedded contexts fueled intellectual content (Wilder 2013). And as activists topple monuments and remove Confederate iconography in response to murders of Black Americans at the hands of police across U.S. regions in 2020, public conversations challenged the sectional myth. Concurrent sympathy movements in Europe in 2020 have contributed to a broadened “Atlantic World” perspective on the system’s history (“EU Declares . . .” 2020).

Introduction to Sociology Textbooks

All of the Introduction to Sociology textbooks narrate U.S. slavery as background to present-day structural racism (particularly in Race/Ethnicity chapters), with economic, political, religious, and cultural manifestations. The majority of these books also describe slavery as regionally bound: 9 of the 13 books, or 69 percent, refer specifically to slavery in the South. Where geographic location is named or pictured in these nine books, it is Southern plantation slavery, as portrayed in Sociology: A Down to Earth Approach (Henslin 2019:287). For example, the first paragraph of one Race/Ethnicity chapter in the book Essentials of Sociology compares contemporary life for African Americans with an account of the number of slaves in the American South in 1780 (Giddens et al. 2019:300). This text does follow with this counter-intuitive description: “[f]eelings of hostility toward blacks on the part of the white population were in some respects more strongly developed in states where slavery had never been known than in the South itself” (Giddens et al. 2019:300), without clarifying which states had not known slavery.

In the textbook The Real World, slavery appears as a historical stage in the global Agricultural Revolution. This text notes that “[i]n the pre-Civil War era, many of the plantations of the South that were owned by whites were farmed by black slaves brought from Africa” (Ferris and Stein 2020:313). The accompanying photo that illustrates this text features an enslaved Black family standing in a cotton field with large baskets of freshly picked cotton (Ferris and Stein 2020:313). In the book Our Social World, a mention of the value of an enslaved person in the antebellum era refers only to the South; while accurate, the potential impression is one of a regionally bound system (Ballantine, Roberts, and Korgen 2020:2015).

Authors also highlight the South’s economic dependence on slavery, but not that of the North. The textbook Sociology: A Brief Introduction states that “prior to the Civil War, you could find in the Southern states of the United States both social classes dividing whites from whites and the institutionalized enslavement of Blacks” (Schaefer 2019:165). The book Sociology Now mentions slavery’s economic disadvantage:

No society has ever been built around pure coercion. A few have come close—the slave society of the antebellum South, for example, or Romania under Nicolai Ceausescu. But such societies have always been vastly inefficient because they must expend almost all of their resources on keeping people in line and punishing dissidents. (Kimmel and Aronson 2019:617)

Notably, none of the 13 books include an explicit reference to slavery in the North. The closest hint is in a passage in Society: The Basics that “free persons of color lived in both the North and the South” (Macionis 2019:354), although a reader could assume that Northern Blacks had always been free. No textbook explicitly states that slavery existed solely in the South, but such may be implied in passages such as “Southern Whites justified slavery by believing that Africans were physically and spiritually subhuman and devoid of souls” (Schaefer 2019:219). Furthermore, all visual illustrations across the textbooks depict Southern plantation slavery. Most direct mentions of the North depict the region in the familiar “savior” role, in righteous opposition to the South, as in this example illustrating the conflict perspective’s assertion that religion can be used to legitimize inequalities with: “ . . . Southern ministers used scripture to defend slavery, saying that it was God’s will—while Northern ministers legitimated their region’s social structure by using scripture to denounce slavery as evil” (Henslin 2019:541). Similar descriptions can be found in Hughes and Kroehler’s Sociology: The Core (2013:361). As noted above, however, Northern ministers manifested a mix of approaches to slavery and abolition.

In textbook synopses of the Civil War, the North is commonly portrayed as a moral champion fighting against slavery. Although none states that the North (or the Union) fought the Civil War solely over slavery’s immorality, omissions of the North’s motivations do not combat common presumptions of the “savior” North and “transgressive” South. The textbook SOC 2018, for instance, states that the Civil War “did not bring real freedom and equality for Blacks,” followed by a mention of Southern Jim Crow laws, although this is the only allusion to Southern slavery across the book (Witt 2018:329). ⁷ The text Introduction to Sociology cites Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1995), which centers on the Black slave trade as a transnational system (Ritzer 2018:284). The map that accompanies this reference, however, portrays the primary U.S. regions that received enslaved labor as extending south from the southern edge of Baltimore, and none of the arrows tracing these triangular flows point as far north as New York (Ritzer 2018:284). This book is one of the four that mentions slavery without the word “South” or “Southern.” However, region could be implied from this map. Similarly, Ferrante’s book Sociology: A Global Perspective (2015) does not discuss slavery as Southern, but features a photo of formerly enslaved Louisiana children. And the book The Sociology Project (Manza, Arum, and Haney 2018) refers to pre-Civil War slavery without mentioning region, but the Civil War reference implies the inter-regional rift over slaveholding. If these three books with implications of the Southern region were added to the list of 9 that use the word “South,” 12 of the 13 books, or 92 percent, would be categorized as “regionally bound.”

Recent textbook editions narrate how collective memories of slavery and the Civil War have recently re-emerged as key, emotional touchpoints in the American public sphere, including on college campuses. These include Confederate flag and monument debates (Macionis 2019:48, 531), with violent confrontations, including the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, detailed in the book SOC (Benokraitis 2019:335). Recent debates over financial reparations for slavery also make an appearance (Schaefer 2019:223). Although most are Southern examples, they do illustrate internal Southern confrontations over attempts to “de-Confederatize” (Loewen 2015). However, these might potentially be read as regional rather than national reckonings. Furthermore, although all textbooks do feature passages on slavery as nationally foundational, such texts do not de-territorialize the portrayal of the system or call out the sectional myth. One account of entrenched slavery in the early colonies is followed by Jim Crow and Civil-Rights-era chronologies, concentrating on the South, implying a sectional myth (M. Hughes and C. Kroehler 2013:230).

Race/Ethnicity Textbooks

As expected, in contrast to the Introductory books, the six Race/Ethnicity books devote more page space to the history of slavery in general. All six books discuss Southern slavery, and four of these, or 67 percent of the total, frame the system as predominantly Southern. Across this sample, the book Majority-Minority Relations (Farley 2011) places the heaviest emphasis on Southern slavery. An extensive inset, “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South” (Farley 2011:122), thickly describes the caste-like paternalistic race relations by first-hand observers. The book includes a caveat, however: “Lest there be any confusion, however, we should recognize that openly racist state and local legislation was not limited to the South or to the pre–Civil War era” (Farley 2011:347). Parrillo’s text, Strangers to These Shores, names Southern slavery as it alludes to an absence of Northern slavery: “As the industrial North and the slaveholding, agrarian South evolved into different societies, they developed different norms” (Parrillo 2014:310). The section continues with the following qualifiers: “Yet there were free blacks in the South also (nearly half a million by 1860)” (Parrillo 2014:310). The book offers this regional contrast: “Jamestown was the seed from which the Southern aristocracy and the slave-based agrarian economy of the South grew, and Plymouth was the forerunner of town meetings (participatory democracy), the abolition movement, and ‘Yankee ingenuity’ (capitalistic enterprise)” (Parrillo 2014:121). This contrast is consistent with public collective memories that distinguish the two regions, implying that their respective populations are polar opposites in character: morally, politically, and economically.

Richard T. Schaefer’s (2015:114) Racial and Ethnic Groups refers to Southern slavery in relation to racial formations: “The long-documented transparent racial divide that engulfed the South during slavery let us ignore how Whiteness was constructed.” This book does not discuss Southern slavery extensively, but mentions the escapes of many enslaved to the North and Canada (Schaefer 2015:170). Without a description of the interlinked system across regions, the North is presented as a haven. The more recent book The Matrix of Race (Ferber, Brunsma, and Coates 2017) is unique in the sample by embedding its central passages on Southern slavery within a macro discussion of the Atlantic-World system of settler colonialism, beginning with slavery in the Spanish colonies (2017:61–74).

All six books do critically discuss slavery as nationally foundational. For example, Schaefer’s (2015:169) Racial and Ethnic Groups similarly states “[b]ecause the institution of slavery was so fundamental to our culture, it continues to influence Black–White relations in the twenty-first century.” However, the text then moves into specific statements about the South, with a visual image of a South Carolina locale (Schaefer 2015:170). Schaefer (2015:169) describes the Slave Codes in detail without naming region, except for one statement about enforcement under Southern law.

In contrast to the Introductory books, Northern slavery is named in the majority of the books: five out of six (83 percent) do so, across a varying range of detail. Strangers to These Shores (Parrillo 2014) is the one book with no reference to slavery outside of the South, although it does detail patterns of Northern anti-Black racism. Schaefer’s textbook includes one reference to the North’s complicity: “slaves were used on Northern universities and owned by college presidents” (Schaefer 2015:172). Marger’s Race and Ethnic Relations references Northern slavery primarily as an institution that the region abandoned intentionally:

Although it had existed in all the colonies at one time or another, slavery by the middle of the eighteenth century was confined to the South, where plantation agriculture had become the foundation of the economy. In the North, political and moral factors had been influential in the decision to abandon slavery, but more important, the system was seen there as a hindrance to continued industrialization. (Marger 2015:166)

Marger does elaborate that racist ideology was prominent across regions: “[d]espite the free status of blacks in the Northern states, their inferiority and inability to assimilate had not been questioned in any quarter” (Marger 2015:170). Another textbook similarly portrays Northern slavery as marginal: “Second, the plantation system required cheap and dependable labor to produce wealth for its owners, which explains why slavery was never institutionalized in the North to the same degree,” followed with “In the North, slaves were largely a luxury for a few wealthy individuals; they were not crucial to the power elite for amassing its wealth” (Farley 2011:117). The book’s recommended student discussion exercise states: “Slavery of African Americans became institutionalized in the U.S. South. Explain why (1) this did not happen in the U.S. North, . . . ” (Farley 2011:133).

Joe R. Feagin and Clarcie Booher Feagin’s (2012:70) Racial and Ethnic Relations is strongly revisionist, naming Northern complicity in the Southern system (“Northern entrepreneurs and bankers were often linked to the Southern economy”), and Northern slavery (“By the late 1700s, . . . slavery was being abolished, sometimes rather slowly, in most Northern states”). There is an allusion to official Northern complicity: “For many years, the U.S. government and Southern and border (and some Northern) state governments passed laws to benefit the powerful slaveholding gentry and to reinforce the racialized definition of and oppression of black Americans” (Feagin and Booher Feagin 2012:170). The text continues,

Between the 1600s and the early 1800s, many Northern whites either enslaved African Americans or considered the slavery system legitimate. Significant numbers of people were enslaved in Northern areas. The wealth of many Northern whites was built up directly or indirectly with forced black labor . . . (Feagin and Booher Feagin 2012:272)

Naming Massachusetts and New York as slaveholding states, the authors explain that “[a] realization that slavery was long entrenched in the North’s economic and legal system is essential for an understanding of the discrimination that black Americans face today in the North” (Feagin and Booher Feagin 2012:272). In contrast to the statements in Farley’s book above, these authors detail how fully institutionalized the system was in the North, across 200 years.

The Matrix of Race (Ferber, Brunsma, and Coates 2017) offers accounts of Northern as well as Southern slavery. Comparatively, this book devotes the most space to de-territorialized accounts, although it does include passages about the Southern plantation system. The book states,

Slavery was also closely linked to economic development in the Northern states, even when the practice itself was banned. Northern banking, finance, insurance, and other industries helped fund and insure the importation and sale of slaves and the products of slave labor. Northern shipbuilders made ships to carry slaves and the commodities they produced. (Ferber, Brunsma, and Coates 2017:134)

This text parallels the history from Feagin and Booher Feagin’s textbook, and supports the point in Martin N. Marger’s (2015:166) narrative that economic motives overruled moral justice concerns (See Note 1). In sum, on a continuum, from least to most revisionist, these books could loosely be categorized as Farley (least revisionist); Parrillo; Marger; Schaefer; Feagin and Booher Feagin; and Ferber, Brunsma, and Coates (most revisionist).