Professor: Textbooks Teach Fake 'Facts,' 'Feel-Good Myths' About The Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman

Michael B. Chesson
Apr. 24, 2016

Among all the American legends that are touted as history in schoolbooks, none is promoted more extravagantly than the story of the Underground Railroad. In textbook after textbook, students read that, in the time before the Civil War, abolitionists established an extensive network of secret routes and hideouts for conducting fugitive slaves to freedom; and in text after text, students find elaborate descriptions of this network and of some of the people who allegedly were associated with it. Unfortunately for the students, very few of the "facts" that appear in schoolbook accounts of the Underground Railroad have any historical foundation, and most of the "facts" are demonstrably false.

I recently have analyzed the material about the Underground Railroad in five so-called history textbooks that are being used in American schools, and I have found that all five tell the same tale -- a mess of feel-good myths masquerading as historical information. These myths, ranging from imaginary conceptions of the Railroad itself to patently fictitious claims about the exploits of Harriet Tubman, are delivered to students in sentences, paragraphs and illustrations that often are interchangeable from book to book. It seems that all the writers have tried to imitate one mythic model while diligently ignoring real history.

The texts that I have inspected are History of a Free Nation (1998; published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill), The American Nation (2000; Prentice Hall), America: Pathways to the Present (2000; Prentice Hall); America's Past and Promise (1998; McDougal Littell); and The American Journey (1998; Glencoe/McGraw-Hill). The first three are high-school books, the others are middle-school books.

All of these texts give students the false impression that the Underground Railroad was a vast, formal system of escape routes, secret signs and safe houses by which fugitive slaves could travel to destinations where slavery no longer existed -- and four of the books contain maps that purport to show this system's trunk lines and branches. The American Journey has two such maps; Free Nation and Pathways and Past and Promise have one map apiece. All the maps are ludicrous. They convey much misinformation, and some of them are so detailed that they resemble diagrams of today's interstate highway system.

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