“Keeping Her Record Bright”: White Women and Racial Instruction in Virginia’s History Curricula, 1919-1932

For more than two decades, Virginia’s high school history teachers were required to teach Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession alongside every American history textbook. This article argues that Mary Munford and other white, predominantly women educator-activists in Virginia fashioned a project of racial instruction around Virginia’s Attitude meant to entrench white supremacy and justify Jim Crow segregation. The textbook, and Lost Cause lessons wrapped in it, was just one part of a larger state system of racial control through history curricula. From the surface, it appears that curricular change and textbook adoption occurred through efforts by men who operated that system—superintendents, Board of Education members who approved textbooks, and leaders of curriculum reviewing committees. While these men often made the decisions that approved curricular guidelines, investigation into the background of curriculum construction reveals that the ideas for new ways to teach history came largely from white women.