American school children receive two distinct versions of United States history depending on what state they live in: one version of the American past aimed to meet the curricular demands of the largest market, California, and an often strikingly different version to meet the increasingly rightwing expectations of the Texas legislature. Most of the other states in the union pick between the two. This episode will examine how this situation developed, the increasing national influence of one Texas evangelical author David Barton, how Americans perceive the relationship of church and state, the continuing war on the theory of evolution, and the strange story of how efforts to post the Ten Commandments in American classrooms can be traced to Hollywood marketing of the 1950s Cecile B. D. Mille epic, The Ten Commandments.

Sources:

Dana Goldstein, “Two States.  Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories,” New York Times, January 12, 2020.

Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015.)

James W. Loewen, Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.)

Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.) 

Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2011  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.)