| Henry Steele Commager |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT HENRY STEELE COMMAGER | |
| amherst college faculty | |
| american historians | |
| historians of the united states | |
| people from pittsburgh | |
| deaths by pneumonia | |
| 1902 births | |
| 1998 deaths | |
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TEXTBOOK CRITICIZED FOR THE WAY IT CHARACTERIZED AFRICAN AMERICANS Commager has been criticized by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack for saying of slavery in the high school textbook he wrote with Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard : "Sambo suffered less than any other class in the South. Although brought here by force, the incurably optimistic negro soon became attached to the country and devoted to his 'white folks.'" {Link without Title} Litwack said, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction , to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s ''Freedom Road''.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois ’s ''Black Reconstruction'', with that intriguing subtitle: ''An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880.'' Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook." {Link without Title} SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS BY COMMAGER
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