The Politics of Historical Oblivion: Misrepresentation and Silence in United States History Textbooks

In her 2024 book, Mneesha Gellman investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, Mneesha's work documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improve over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This work argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented. 

Mneesha Gellman is an associate professor of political science at Emerson College whose research interests include comparative democratization, cultural resilience, memory politics, and education policy in the Global South and the United States. Her current research looks at how citizens are formed in the formal education sector and in community-run spaces organized around mother tongue and heritage language learning.

Gellman's previous book, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, November 2022),  examines how Indigenous high school students resist assimilation and assert their identities through access to Indigenous language classes in public schools.

Gellman also informs immigration court proceedings by serving as a pro bono expert witness for asylum hearings regarding conditions of violence in El Salvador, Mexico, and Turkey, where she works to provide specific political contexts of violence experienced by specific groups of people.

Additionally, Gellman is the founder/director of the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI), which brings high quality liberal arts education to incarcerated students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) at Concord, a men's medium security prison. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University.

Presented by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies with the History Department and Department of Chicano and Latino Studies