About Textbook History

Textbook History is the personal journal of Ronald Ladouceur, an independent scholar interested in the intersection of history, science and visual rhetoric. Articles here are inspired by history, anatomy, and biology textbooks published in the United States between 1845 and 1970, including the 135+ textbooks in the author’s personal collection. Textbooks, it turns out, are…

Classroom Biology: Before and After the Bomb

May 26, 2009 Biology textbook authors in the first decades of the twentieth century, exploiting cultural anxieties fanned by Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Paul Popenoe and other eugenic theorists, helped undercut democracy and shore up the status quo by “confirming” suspicions that the “strongest” weren’t breeding, the “weakest” weren’t dying and that workers who…