Representing African American Women in U.S. History Textbooks
This article addresses the dearth of African American women in high school U.S. history textbooks. The authors conducted a content analysis of the images in an African American history textbook and found that black women are underrepresented. Women are found in less than 15 percent of the images in the African American history text, while they make up nearly 30–50 percent of the images in two mainstream texts that the authors analyzed. The authors use Rachel Mattson's five heuristics to show how to incorporate images of black women in more meaningful ways in the curriculum: sourcing, inside-the-frame/outside-the-frame, intertextuality, framing historical questions, and using visual codes and conventions.