Report: Textbooks Ignore Labor History

Most American children never receive any education about the union movement’s proper place in our country’s history and its many contributions to the nation’s development, according to a new report.

“American Labor and U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center, surveys four major textbooks that together account for most of the market in U.S. history textbooks. The report found that these textbooks often present labor history in a biased, negative way, focusing on strikes and strike violence while giving little or no attention to the employer abuse and violence that caused the strikes....