The White Gunman, the Anti-Semitic Entrepreneur, and Other Dilemmas: Autoethnography of a History Textbook Author

• In Event: Under-Examined Topics in Social Studies Research

Abstract

History textbook authors are widely seen as implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchies because their discourse reifies marginalization. However, there is little literature in which history textbook authors examine their ethical and ideological choices. I conduct an autoethnography focusing on four sentence-level dilemmas I struggled with as I wrote and revised a US history textbook. I take as data multiple drafts of my manuscript and correspondence between me and my editor. I examine how the final text was constructed through an iterative, dialogical process, concluding that my response to these dilemmas reflects the web of relationships in which I was enmeshed—with the book’s end users, with former students, with other scholars, and with publications staff.

Author

• Rosalie Metro, University of Missouri - Columbia