"Will You Remember This?" Performances of a Confederate Geography Textbook and the Construction of Childhood

• In Event: 16.018 - Confronting the Past in Transnational Textbooks, Schooling, and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper will serve as an analysis of Marinda Branson Moore’s (1863) Confederate textbook, The Geographical Reader, for the Dixie Children. This textbook advocated a particular construction and performance of childhood, a pedagogical script that served as a kind of ritual, a lived rehearsal of Southern identity in the theater of the Confederate school. In order to engage in this critical inquiry, I will utilize cultural historian Robin Bernstein’s (2011) theory of a “scriptive thing,” demonstrating how the curriculum of Moore’s Geography moved from the archive into the repertoire, inspiring embodied performances by Confederate children. Finally, I will briefly consider how traces of these (pedagogical) performances are still at work in curricula today.

Author

• Jeremy Godwin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill