Reconstruction narratives in Mississippi history text books 1887-1976

The goal of this study was to identify and analyze Lost Cause myths in Reconstruction narratives and identify themes that helped maintain the existing social structure/ hierarchy. This was done through analyzing the Reconstruction accounts in Mississippi history textbooks. The texts were the Mississippi history textbooks available in a large university library. The 1887 text was the earliest text I could find and the latest text was 2013. The texts were primarily published by companies in the South. Only two texts that are described in this analysis were published in the North: Lowry and McCardle (1892) in New York and Sansing (1981) in Minnesota. I employed content analysis to analyze the texts. My initial analysis used an inductive approach to identify the themes that emerged from an initial text (Berg, 2007). An initial review of one text (Riley, 1915) identified a base set of themes from the Reconstruction narrative to be used as a starting point for analysis of the other texts. The initial set of themes was derived from the texts, because the goal was to identify themes that emerged from the texts and then see how these themes were presented overtime. I then shifted to a combination of deductive and inductive approaches with the remaining texts. I used the initial set of themes to guide my analysis, but was open to the introduction of new themes that emerged in the other texts. The short version paper was published in the International Society of the Social Studies Conference Proceedings (2014).Anthony, K. (2014). Pedagogy of oppression: Reconstruction narratives in Mississippi history text books 1887-1976. in The International Society for the Social Studies Annual Conference Proceedings, Russell, W. (Ed.). Orlando, FL: The International Society for the Social Studies.