A Comparison of the Treatent of Selected Subjects in American History in the Ninth, Eleventh, and Fourteenth Editions of the Encycloaedia Britannica
Graduation Date
Spring 1960
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
Some years ago, when I was teaching American history to high school seniors, I came across an American history textbook published in 1907. The title of the book and its author have been forgotten, but the inspiration for this paper is a direct result of my idle thumbing through the pages of the book. It was during the second semester of the course, and my class stood on the brink of the Spanish-American War. Anxious to see what our parents or grandparents had learned about that War, I read the section dealing with the events leading up to that summer conflict in my 1907 textbook.
Written during what has aptly been called America's "Age of Innocence," the old text presented quite a contrast to the rather brittle and caustic treatment of the Spanish-American War by Thomas Bailey in The American Pageant,1 the text that my students were then using.
Inspired as I was by my interesting and amusing discovery I decided to pursue, for the subject of my dissertation, the question of how much change there had been in the writing of American history in the last two or three generations as represented in textbooks used by high schools. Discussing this problem with the Right Reverend Monsignor James M. Campbell, I was dissuaded from my original intent because of the mechanical difficulty of obtaining the necessary material without being able to travel to places like the Library of Congress and the Office of Education in Washington, D. C. Father Campbell also suggested that the subject I had chosen was too monumental for a Master's dissertation, and that I would be wiser to confine myself to various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; that reference work being quite representative, in its historical material, of any trends occurring in the field of American historiography.
I have selected, therefore, for my subject A Comparison of the Treatment of Selected Subjects in American History in the Ninth, Eleventh and Fourteenth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I have started with the Ninth edition, rather than going back to earlier editions, because that is the first edition of the Encyclopaedia that had substantial American participation in its production and marketing. The Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Editions are not included as they were merely supplements to their predecessors and not really new editions in the true sense of the word.