American Grammar

Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation

Jarvis R. Givens

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780063259164
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: History

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as “the great equalizer” to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.

Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become highly politicized, placing its true colors on full display—a battleground where clashes over free speech and book bans abound, and where the suppression of knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have taken center stage. Political forces are waging a war on academic freedom, raising serious questions. What gets taught, how, by whom, and who gets to decide? Yet, how might our perception of this reality shift when we recognize such battles as expressions of a relationship between race, power, and schooling as old as the country itself?

Access and equity in public education have long been discussed and attempts to address the educational debts owed to historically oppressed groups have taken the form of modern innovations and promises of future improvement. Yet the past plays an equally significant role in structuring our present reality—and in the case of our education system, there is a dark, unexamined history that continues to influence how schools forge our world.

Harvard University professor Jarvis R. Givens, an expert in the fields of American Educational History and African American Studies, draws on his own personal experiences and academic expertise to unveil how the political-economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education as an inequitable system premised on white possession and white benefit. In doing so, he clarifies that present conflicts are not merely culture wars, but indeed structural in nature. American Grammar is a revised origin story that exposes this legacy of racial domination in schooling, demonstrating how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never all-together separate experiences, but indeed relational, all part of an emergent national educational landscape. Givens reveals how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students; how funds from the US War Department developed native boarding schools; and how classroom lessons socialized students into an American identity grounded in antiblackness and anti-Nativeness, whereby the substance of schooling mirrored the very structure of US education.  

In unraveling this past, Givens provides more honest language for those working to imagine and build a truly more egalitarian future for all learners and communities, and especially those most vulnerable among us.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Susan’s Mark
• Part I: A New Origin Story of American Schooling
• 1. 1819: A Crossroads in Early US Education
• 2. Federal Funding for Native Schooling in the Early Nineteenth Century
• 3. Anti-Literacy Laws and the Roots of Antiblack Education Policy
• 4. Native Land, Black Labor, and the Development of Schooling as a White Good
• Part II: Education and the American Indian Wars
• 5. The Aims of Native Schooling for an Expanding Settler Nation
• 6. Settler Schooling as an Act of War
• 7. “Boarding School Is Now the Ancestor”
• 8. Native Student Resistance and the Roots of Native American Literature
• Part III: Black Education in Indian Territory
• 9. Race, Slavery, and Education Among the Five “Civilized” Tribes
• 10. Black Education in the Post-Removal Chaos of Indian Territory
• 11. A Creek School Becomes Barracks for the Confederate Army
• 12. Education and Freedmen Futurity Among the Five Tribes
• Part IV: Booker T. Washington and the Founding Racial Triad
• 13. Booker T. Washington: A Monumental American Life
• 14. Slavery and Settler Colonialism in the Educational World of Booker T. Washington, 1856–1872
• 15. “Black Race and Red Race” at Hampton Institute, 1872–1881
• 16. A Sioux Student, a Black Principal, and the US President
• Conclusion: The Presence of History in the Future(s) of American Education
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Jarvis R. Givens
• Copyright
• About the Publisher