Despite rarely attracting serious attention from scholars in either the United States or the United Kingdom, the work of Scottish Enlightenment historian Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (1747-1813), was foundational to the early development of world history teaching in the United States. Though precise sales records in this period are unavailable, as both a work of reference for students and a classroom textbook, Tytler’s Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, originally published in 1801, was “immensely popular” in early nineteenth-century American education.Footnote 1 Versions of Tytler’s work were assigned at both Harvard and Yale until the 1840s, and adopted by Boston’s English High School in 1823 as the school’s first textbook in General History.Footnote 2 In the 1830s, thirty years after the book’s original publication, a Boston publisher advertised an edition of the text by noting that “this work has been introduced into nearly all the Colleges and principal High Schools in the United States, and is a work well adapted for private libraries.”Footnote 3 Publication of the text was a transatlantic affair, with versions appearing in Scotland, England, Ireland, and the United States. In critically assessing Tytler’s work, the article asks two central questions: In an era during which scholars identify rising nationalist discourses in history teaching, how do we explain the American popularity of a book written by a Scottish aristocrat with monarchist sympathies? Second, what do the many revisions to Tytler’s work on both sides of the Atlantic reveal about changing perceptions of world history education in the first half of the nineteenth century?
Despite its sustained popularity over time, Tytler’s Elements of General History has largely fallen through the cracks of scholarship on universal history, which infrequently focuses on schooling, and scholarship on the early development of history teaching, which has been more preoccupied with the proliferation of national histories than global or world histories. Tytler’s tome was part of the long tradition of European universal history, a tradition that crafted totalizing narratives of the human past.Footnote 4 Universal history was a booming area of inquiry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as rationalist Enlightenment historians and their nineteenth-century successors replaced older Christian universal histories with linear and progressive narratives centered on the European past.Footnote 5 Mark Graham recently made the case that universal history has too often been overlooked in American intellectual history as scholars have instead emphasized an early American obsession with classicism. Graham’s analysis of the American reception to the work of Charles Rollin persuasively makes the case for the influence of universal history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 6 An exploration of Alexander Fraser Tytler’s work extends Graham’s emphasis on the significance of universal history for early American historicism by centering educational sources and by identifying the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on American perceptions of universal history.
In recent years, scholars have sharply critiqued universal histories, especially their association with imperialism and their teleological focus on the rise of Europe in world history.Footnote 7 Though he notes the diversity of historical narratives associated with universal history, Brett Bowden cites fundamental flaws in the historical approach, because universal history
holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point; all are destined to travel the same path through history and arrive, sooner or later, at the same end point, modernity.Footnote 8
Postcolonial scholars situate universal history, along with other Western educational practices, in a long tradition of epistemological domination over knowledge itself, implicating the historical discipline in the process of global colonialism in the modern world.Footnote 9 According to John Willinsky, “five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the world.”Footnote 10 Nevertheless, scholars including Marnie Hughes-Warrington suggest the possibility of more complicated outcomes whereby universal histories in the modern era could reflect “local demands and interests” rather than global teleologies.Footnote 11
Tytler’s Elements of General History provided just the sort of teleological and Eurocentric narrative that critics of universal history bemoan. That there is little scholarship on the work despite its popularity in schools over a span of several decades reflects a tendency of intellectual and world historians to focus on major Enlightenment and nineteenth-century figures in philosophy, and a relative neglect of schools and schooling as sites for the proliferation of universal histories. In the United States, the work became the standard textbook for a subject called General History or Universal History, which gradually emerged in the American secondary curriculum during the first few decades of the 1800s.Footnote 12 Across the Atlantic world, the work was so popular that it “probably enjoyed wider distribution and a larger print run than the better-known works of Hegel and Marx.”Footnote 13
Scholarship on the development of history teaching in the United States has only mentioned General History in passing, rarely examining world history content prior to the professionalization of the historical discipline in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 14 Instead, the literature has focused overwhelmingly on the rise and development of the subject of American history.Footnote 15 However, the common presence of General History in US education from the very earliest decades of the nineteenth century suggests a need for greater scholarly attention. As early American educators sought to teach students about the history of their own country, they taught parallel narratives situating the United States within a global historical context. Universal history offered a ready-made explanation for US expansion and significance, and a justification for European and North American domination over “Others” deemed to be less significant to human history.Footnote 16
This article’s exploration of the transatlantic proliferation of Tytler’s influential universal history reveals that such histories could be both broadly acceptable to audiences across national boundaries yet also edited and revised to support nationalist and religious agendas in early nineteenth-century educational settings. Scholars have acknowledged that Tytler’s work was an early and popular General History text for both British and American audiences but have not fully explored what the editions of Elements of General History said, nor how the text evolved over time through its various printings.Footnote 17 A closer look at these editions reveals that American and British editors made significant revisions and/or additions that quite often fundamentally altered the textual narrative. The name on the spine of the book remained the same, but the tone and tenor of the text evolved with the changing demands of swiftly developing educational marketplaces.Footnote 18
Textbooks like Tytler’s represent one of the most significant sources of information on history teaching in the early United States.Footnote 19 Research into early history textbooks generally supports Ruth Elson’s idea that textbooks served as “guardians of tradition” that promoted nationalism in the nineteenth century. Margaret Nash’s 2009 analysis of the earliest generation of history textbooks (1783-1815) found that religious piety and regionalism were equally as evident as nascent nationalism. Both authors suggest that American textbook authors rejected the European past as an important step in the construction of American nationalism, a common assertion in research on early American textbooks.Footnote 20 But a broader look at the development of early American historical thinking complicates this picture. According to Eileen Ka-May Cheng, rather than reject Europe, early American historians “took part in a larger transatlantic culture as they appropriated European ideas for their own purposes.”Footnote 21 The continued refashioning of Elements of General History indicate just such a process of borrowing and adaption, where transatlantic currents of historical thinking were refashioned to better suit burgeoning nationalist ends.
The many editions of Elements of General History provide a window into a shared imaginary of the human past crafted by scholars, educators, and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the nineteenth century. Americans were perfectly willing to borrow from European histories, including especially European presumptions of civilizational superiority, while simultaneously establishing their own unique views of the exceptional place of the United States in the world. Though editors over time made some changes to the depiction of Christian history, the text proved acceptable across Protestant denominational boundaries in multiple contexts, providing further evidence of a common understanding of human history among Anglo-Protestants. In adapting Tytler’s universal history, American educators retrofitted the work to provide an origin story for the United States in which America was the heir to European civilization. The success of Tytler’s narrative demonstrates that Eurocentric world histories have been deeply entwined with American education since the emergence of history in schools, providing a civilizational framing that neatly complemented the budding ideology of American exceptionalism.Footnote 22
Alexander Fraser Tytler’s World
Though historians have not regarded Alexander Fraser Tytler (Figure 1) as an original or important thinker, they have emphasized the significance of the Scottish Enlightenment, of which he was a part, to the development of early American historical thinking. Historian of early America Peter C. Messer makes a compelling case that American engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment was central to the development of early American history.Footnote 23 Scottish Enlightenment historians, along with many of their European contemporaries, generally depicted human history as a progressive march toward higher levels of civilization. Unsurprisingly, they consistently rated European civilization as the apex of human development, often casting other societies as “primitive,” “barbarous,” “savage,” or, in some cases, so uncivilized as to be unworthy of historical attention at all.Footnote 24 In so doing, universal historians crafted enduring tropes about the superiority of western Europe that marginalized or denigrated the histories of Asian, African, Latin American, and Indigenous peoples.
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Picture by H. Raeburn, drawn by J. Jackson, engraved by C. Picart, May 10, 1813. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
It is within this context that we must examine the work of Alexander Fraser Tytler. Exploring the development of his writing from the 1780s until the first American edition of Elements of General History in 1809 reveals two important findings. First, the key benefit of Tytler’s historical work was not in its historical originality or literary brilliance, but rather in its perceived accessibility. A recent biographer argues that Tytler “has not been remembered as a major contributor to historical scholarship,” and pales in comparison to other Scottish Enlightenment historians such as Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, David Hume, and William Robertson.Footnote 25 Nevertheless, Tytler’s work was valuable as an educational tool because it contained a “concise and luminous arrangement of historical events” that, at the time, was thought to be quite understandable and accessible to pupils.Footnote 26 Secondly, Tytler’s conservative version of Scottish Enlightenment thought neatly aligned with the New England educational community of the first decade of the nineteenth century, especially his rationale for historical study, his framework for inclusion/exclusion in world history, and his strongly Protestant historical narrative, which together made the text popular with both British and American audiences. The predominantly Anglo-Protestant American educators who were most influential in early American education had no desire to reject Scottish Enlightenment universal histories of humanity. They simply insisted on the inclusion of the newly independent United States as the heir to what they saw as the grand heritage of Europe.
Born into a well-known intellectual Scottish family, Alexander Fraser Tytler first practiced law before his appointment at the University of Edinburgh as a professor of Universal History in 1780.Footnote 27 In his professorial role he made a significant impact on his most famous student, Sir Walter Scott, and initiated a brief revival for the discipline of history in the University of Edinburgh curriculum.Footnote 28 He first published A Plan and Outlines of a Course of Lectures on Universal History, Ancient and Modern in 1782.Footnote 29 This publication was based on his lectures and served as the foundation for his later textbooks. In 1801, Tytler published an expanded version of his lectures as Elements of General History in Edinburgh.Footnote 30 At only two volumes, Tytler’s universal history was quite short by comparison to other English-language examples such as the early nineteenth century twenty-five volume Universal History, Ancient and Modern by William Fordyce Mavor or the highly influential sixty-five volume An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time. Compiled from Original Authors, published in the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 31 Tytler’s book was a success in Scotland and England, going through multiple editions in the first decade of the nineteenth century.Footnote 32
A staunch Tory, Tytler’s political connections ultimately led to positions as a Judge Advocate and Lord of Sessions in the Scottish Courts, and subsequently to his elevation to the peerage as Lord Woodhouselee in 1802.Footnote 33 In line with other Scottish historians of his day, Tytler passionately defended the 1707 Act of Union with Great Britain as critical for Scottish prosperity.Footnote 34 Historian Colin Kidd argues that the defense of the Act of Union significantly weakened the development of a strong sense of Scottish nationalism, because, for many Scottish Enlightenment historians, it meant a rejection of Scotland’s pre-Union past.Footnote 35 But the rejection of the feudal past and the development of theories about the morally and politically progressive development of society were, in part, what made the Scottish Enlightenment historical tradition so useful for American historians and educators.Footnote 36
The creation of virtuous and informed citizens was the raison d’être for Tytler’s textbooks.Footnote 37 Private virtue of the citizenry was critical to ensure public virtue in the political realm. History could substantiate the otherwise abstract precepts of morality, philosophy, and theology that most contemporary education sought to confer.Footnote 38 Tytler also made a case for the value of historical study for civic participation, arguing that “in this country, where every individual is an active member of the constitution, it is his indispensable duty to be acquainted with the science of Politics.”Footnote 39 Tytler was openly skeptical about the long-term prospects of unfettered democracy but also wary of the rise of despotism.Footnote 40 These messages resonated deeply with audiences across the Atlantic. For Americans at the dawn of the nineteenth century, as Margaret Nash points out, republican values and virtues were not exclusively American, but reflected “an Enlightenment view of universal principles” similar to what Tytler espoused in his writings.Footnote 41 Society was constantly threatened with the loss of public and private virtue, which could end the blessings of freedom in the blink of an eye. Vigilance, education, and a relentless pursuit of virtue were indispensable safeguards to protect societal liberties.
Philosophically, Tytler designed his course “to exhibit a progressive view of the state of mankind,” by delineating “the great outlines of their history.”Footnote 42 This statement revealed both his immersion in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition of stagist depictions of human history and his awareness of the necessity of a systematic approach to history.Footnote 43 Contemporary educators perceived the danger of getting bogged down in a mass of disconnected factual information, a particularly acute problem for a subject as vast as universal history. As one British reviewer commented in 1802, if a historical work was “calculated to enable those who have read volumes of detached historians to methodize their knowledge, their value is great; but, if they serve not this purpose, they are of no utility.”Footnote 44 Given his background in law, and the legal emphasis of the University of Edinburgh curriculum in the late eighteenth century, it is noteworthy that Tytler chose to go beyond covering legal and political history, including “particular attention on the manners of nations” as well as an assessment of intellectual and cultural developments in the arts and sciences.Footnote 45
Arguably Tytler’s most important historiographical innovation was a decision to arrange Elements of General History around a narrative of dominant nations. He claimed that
when the world is viewed at any period either of ancient or of modern history, we generally observe one nation or empire predominant, to whom all the rest bear, as it were, an under part, and to whose history we find that the principal events in the annals of other nations may be referred from some natural connection.Footnote 46
Societies or empires that he considered neither dominant, nor greatly connected to the dominant nation, could safely be left out of this project of universal history.Footnote 47 In ancient history, this involved a focus on Greece and Rome, but content on the modern era mostly involved a cast of European nations. This allowed Tytler to be highly selective in what historical content was included and justified his choice to center his history on the European past.
Elements of General History considered and discussed non-European peoples, but only minimally. Two brief chapters on Egypt and Phoenicia were the only pages dedicated to non-European history in the first volume on ancient history. However, Tytler included information on China, India, and Japan in his second volume on modern history that included a consideration of their full history. Echoing Orientalist scholars of the late eighteenth century, the book observes of China that “the sciences have been stationary in this empire for many ages; and they are this day extremely low, though far beyond the attainments of a barbarous people.”Footnote 48 However, Tytler did not outright dismiss non-European contributions to human history. For instance, he claimed that there was “a high probability” that European learning in the ancient world largely came from India.Footnote 49 Despite occasionally positive treatments of the non-European world, the clear implication of the work was that the “great outlines of history” normally included Asia and Africa only insofar as they interacted with Europeans, whom Tytler viewed as dominant throughout history.
Tytler’s strongly Protestant, but not overtly denominational, account of human history was also critical to the work’s transatlantic appeal, at least among Protestant audiences. Scholars have long asserted that anti-Catholicism served as a key marker of Anglo-identity in the four nations of the British Isles and Britain’s North American colonies in the century after the Glorious Revolution of 1689, which tended to unite Protestants despite denominational differences.Footnote 50 Like many Protestants of his day, Tytler believed that the Christian Church became corrupted with “superstition” in the late Roman Empire. The “superstitions” that he listed were all elements of Roman Catholic doctrine, including “the worship of saints and relics,” “an intermediate state of purification,” “celibacy of the priests,” and “monastic seclusion.”Footnote 51 Tytler’s interpretation of the Protestant Reformation similarly contrasted the “virtuous lives and conduct of the Protestant leaders, compared with those of the higher clergy among the Catholics,” which “formed a contrast very favourable to the progress of the Reformation.”Footnote 52
Protestant Christianity was therefore an important narrative plank of Tytler’s writings, but his approach was not without controversy. The work adopted the historical chronology outlined by Archbishop Ussher, which utilized a literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative to conclude that the world was created in 4004 BC.Footnote 53 But though Tytler accepted a Biblical chronology and acknowledged the distinction between “sacred” and “profane” history, meaning the distinction between Biblical and historical accounts of antiquity, his work did not meaningfully engage with the Old Testament accounts because he regarded them as “belonging to a different department of academical education.”Footnote 54 At a time when many historical textbooks in English were written by Christian ministers, this omission of Biblical history became controversial and was the subject of revision in succeeding editions of the text. Despite the perceived need for revision, Tytler’s approach to Biblical and Church history proved broadly acceptable to Protestant educators in Scotland, England, and the United States in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. That this appeal was limited to Anglo-Protestants is indicated by the fact that there is evidence of only a single edition of the work in Catholic Ireland, and that was for an Anglo-Irish school led by Presbyterian Thomas Dix Hincks.Footnote 55
Two other noteworthy features of the original two-volume edition of Tytler’s Elements of General History help to explain the availability and popularity of the textbook for American audiences. First, his choice of publisher was fortuitous. William Creech, the original publisher of the work from Edinburgh, had a business relationship with the London-based publishing firm of Cadell & Davies, which in turn was well known in the United States, having supplied the very first books to the Library of Congress in the year 1800, only a year before the publication of Tytler’s two-volume universal history.Footnote 56 Second, though Tytler wrote the book in the 1780s, he chose to end the narrative of events at the close of the seventeenth century.Footnote 57 For British history, which received more attention than other European countries, this meant ending with the colossally important Glorious Revolution and its implications for the ascendancy of parliamentary government.
Though later editors saw the lack of attention to recent history as a deficiency of the work that needed to be rectified through the creation of “continuations,” or updates to the chronological coverage, it likely contributed to the book’s success for Americans. Tytler’s chronological organization meant that the work did not cover the tumultuous relationship between Britain and its North American colonies culminating in the American Revolutionary War in the eighteenth century. Nor did it discuss the ongoing and frighteningly controversial events of the French Revolution that drove factional discord in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century United States.Footnote 58 In other words: Tytler’s work contained little that might offend American sensibilities when it came to the establishment of the independent United States. In fact, it contained a mere handful of pages mentioning North America at all.
Altogether, the two-volume Elements of General History by Alexander Fraser Tytler offered a concise universal history from a respectable and authoritative Scottish figure. The narrative that Tytler offered presented a myopically Eurocentric and decidedly Protestant perspective, but one depicting a view of history that many Americans agreed with: a stagist view of the “progressive” development of humanity—with Europeans, of course, at the pinnacle of human development—and an emphasis on the use of history for the creation of private and public virtue. These features made the text highly desirable to educators in the United States, but as the following section will show, American educators made multiple important revisions to the work before it would be deemed acceptable for students.
Proliferating Editions of a Pirated Text
In the years following the publication of Tytler’s work, educators began adapting the text to their own pedagogical contexts. With no international copyright laws in place, American publishers routinely pirated European works, including history textbooks.Footnote 59 Publishers hired editors to update the text and make it suitable for an evolving readership.Footnote 60 By the 1810s the book became a standard history text assigned at Harvard and Yale, as well as at multiple seminaries and academies. The editorial choices made in succeeding editions are highly revealing of evolving pedagogical and nationalist priorities. Editors on both sides of the Atlantic altered some content in the text, especially related to religious and nationalist priorities, but left much of the rest of the narrative intact. This section traces the editorial refashioning of the work, which gradually increased nationalist content while still largely accepting the civilizational chauvinism at the center of Tytler’s history.
The first one-volume American edition was published by Francis Nichols in Philadelphia in 1809. To achieve a trimmer version, the unnamed American editors made substantial alterations to the text, cutting multiple chapters, including coverage of English history and the English Constitution from the 1801 text. The editors also made additions to better suit the educational desires of an American audience. The advertisement of the work, pictured in Figure 2, stressed two signature changes: The section on the history of America was expanded, and a history of Jewish people was added as an appendix.Footnote 61
Advertisement for the first American edition of Tytler’s Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (F. Nichols, 1809). Image courtesy of the University of Kansas Spencer Research Library.
Figure 2 Long description
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. May, 1809. ADVERTISEMENT TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. The history of America has been corrected and enlarged by the Rev. Dr. Holmes, author of a very useful book entitled American Annals, 2 vols. 8vo. The History of the Jews, in the Appendix, is merely an outline designed to correspond with the plan of Mr. Tytler. The substance of it is taken from good authorities, as Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible, Howell's History of the Bible, Anquetil's Universal History,with other modern writers. Sections II, III, IV are selected literally from Keat's Elements of General Knowledge. In the Jewish History the true date of the birth of Christ is placed four years before the common eracomma or A. D. 1, which, according to the chronology of Archbishop Usher, should be referred to the year before Christ. Hence if 4 be added to any year before Christ, the sum will be the year before Christ according to the vulgar era, and if we subtract four years from any year after Christ, the remainder will be the year of Christ according to the vulgar era. As a proof of the favourable reception of this book in Britain it may be proper to inform the reader that it has gone through four (if not five) editions, in 2 vols. 8vo, since 1801. May, 1809.
To rewrite the history of America for a US-based readership, the editors of the 1809 Francis Nichols edition turned to prominent New England historian Abiel Holmes (Figure 3). A close friend of Jedidiah Morse, a fellow Congregational minister and America’s leading geographer, Holmes had established a reputation for himself as a historian with the 1805 publication of American Annals, a key source for biographers and textbook authors until the 1830s.Footnote 62 Rather than write whole new chapters, Holmes’s contribution to the 1809 Nichols edition was only a modest expansion, around three pages long, to a preexisting chapter on European colonization. The narrative in this section included content all the way to the passage of the US Constitution in 1789, far ahead of the chronological coverage of the rest of the book. Compared with later editions of the text, the narrative did not engage in fiery nationalist rhetoric. In describing the cause of the American Revolution, for instance, Holmes simply said that the British government enacted measures that the colonies “deemed injurious to their interest.”Footnote 63
Abiel Holmes. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Evidence of Holmes’s belief in the value of world history for American audiences can be found in an 1814 address he gave to the newly formed American Antiquarian Society. Holmes expressed a sense of frustration that the new nation lacked an ancient history of its own. Americans were in their “infancy” as a nation, and “in vain, then, do we make pretensions to an ancient origin, unless we recross the Atlantic, and trace it through the medium of a Parent whom, though now declared an enemy, we need not blush to acknowledge.”Footnote 64 Tracing American history backwards through British and European history, and ultimately to the ancient world, therefore provided a much-needed sense of solidity to the American narrative. From this perspective, simply including the history of the United States in Elements of General History was in and of itself a radical act, one asserting a global significance for the new nation that European historians such as Tytler would not have accepted.
The other significant change made to Tytler’s work in the 1809 F. Nichols edition was the inclusion of an appendix relating the sacred history of the Jewish peoples, taken from a literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative. While the original work contended that Old Testament accounts more properly lay outside the discipline of history, it was vital to the American editors that this material be included. The first chapter of the appendix openly disagreed with Tytler, stating: “The Jewish annals are the most ancient of all that have been transmitted to us, and the most intrinsically rational and probable.”Footnote 65 Sacred history by this account fit firmly within the purview of the discipline of history, and could safely be trusted as a “rational” source of information.Footnote 66 Calls for the inclusion of sacred history came from both sides of the Atlantic, but it is not surprising that early 19th century American publishers included such material. Practically, American colleges expected a knowledge of sacred history, and teachers therefore wanted it included in the textbooks that they adopted.Footnote 67 Scholarship on early American historicism emphasizes the lasting influence of Christian theology on early American historians, many of whom were ministers.Footnote 68
The second American edition of Elements of General History, published in 1817 by Francis Nichols, more directly challenged Tytler’s original source text. In addition to the changes made in the 1809 edition, the new version included a short treatise from Joseph Priestley on the American Constitution.Footnote 69 But the most interesting alterations to the 1817 Francis Nichols edition are a series of editorial comments appearing throughout the text, many of which directly contradicted the original author.Footnote 70 The most extraordinary comment came in a depiction of the Persian Empire:
It is to be regretted, that the time of youth should be occupied by such unprofitable pursuits as the study of the obscure and doubtful history of ancient and barbarous nations; for no real benefit can be derived from this study, partly because their history is destitute of satisfactory authority, and partly because their state of civilization, and their moral and political condition, are widely different from ours.Footnote 71
The editor’s denigration of ancient peoples extended not just to the Persian Empire, but also to ancient Athenian and Spartan society, whom the editor declared to be “capricious” and “barbarous,” respectively.Footnote 72 At a time when the classical curriculum dominated American higher education, openly questioning the value of studying ancient Greece and Rome is a puzzling choice.Footnote 73 The only explanation provided by the editor was that in-text comments were suggested and approved by “competent judges” with experience using the textbook in American seminaries. Comments updating Tytler’s scholarship and questioning the source text were therefore made to directly suit the interests of American educators.Footnote 74
As the popularity of Tytler’s texts grew in the schools, companion volumes containing examination questions for student assessment began to appear in the American marketplace. By 1825, New York educator Jonathan Seymour, who thought that Tytler’s system was “preferable to any other,” had published at least four editions of Questions Adapted to the Study of Tytler’s Elements of History.Footnote 75 The book contained hundreds of questions for pupils using the American versions of Tytler’s text. Seymour also provided a course of reading related to history, providing a fascinating depiction of what the author considered a complete historical education. In line with American editors of Tytler’s textbook, Seymour’s course of reading followed a linear trajectory of historical development from the ancient European world to the beginnings of the United States, with a reading list including European authors such as Charles Rollin, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and American authors including David Ramsay.Footnote 76
Taken together, alterations to Tytler’s Elements of General History into the second decade of the nineteenth century reveal an effort to modify the source text to suit differing educational contexts by inserting marginal notations, adding examination questions, updating chronological tables, or providing additional historical content. But though some retrofitting was required, the popularity of the work suggests that Tytler’s Eurocentric and Protestant-coded historical narrative suited a wide variety of educators in the English-speaking world.
The decision of US publishers to enhance coverage of the United States indicated not only a practical need for students to receive their own history, but a statement that the United States deserved to be mentioned in Tytler’s sweeping overview of human history centered only on the most significant nations. Indeed, while Paul Gutacker’s work The Old Faith in a New Nation recently demonstrated that the study of Church history in educational settings was critical for the proliferation of American exceptionalism in Jacksonian America, an analysis of the American versions of Tytler’s universal history indicates that this process was well underway in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and spread across American educational settings more broadly than Gutacker’s account suggests.Footnote 77
Transatlantic Updates, 1818-1823
In 1818, a young Samuel Goodrich, before the breakout success of his bestselling series of educational histories narrated by the fictional Peter Parley, decided to publish another American edition of Tytler’s text that would directly compete with the 1817 version published in New York by Francis Nichols.Footnote 78 He commissioned Thomas Robbins, a Congregationalist minister based in Connecticut, to edit the work and, especially, to craft a “continuation” of Tytler’s original, bringing the narration of events to the early nineteenth century.Footnote 79 The resultant text reveals a continued attachment to Scottish Enlightenment thought, as evidenced by Robbins declaring William Robertson and David Hume to be “the first historians of modern times.”Footnote 80 The continuation provided a zealously religious interpretation of events in the United States and the world, frequently offering strong opinions on controversial topics, including denouncing slavery in the history of colonization and praising the newly independent Haitian Republic.Footnote 81 In his narration of recent world history, Robbins provided a fascinating entrée into the worldview of a bitterly disappointed Federalist.Footnote 82 The central element of his narrative of contemporary history was the fallout from the French Revolution, which he depicted as “the greatest scourge experienced by the nations of Europe, since the rise of the modern kingdoms.”Footnote 83 He saw the American Revolution as a key catalyst of the French Revolution, since exposure to civil liberty and republican institutions were “unsuited to the genius of that capricious people.”Footnote 84 For Robbins, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were really conflicts between the forces of Protestant Christianity and irreligion, and Britain received the highest praise as the Christian nation that “divine Providence had singularly prepared” to withstand the fury of the French revolutionaries.Footnote 85
Another important element of Robbins’s update was, even by the Eurocentric standards of the source text, an extremely dismissive attitude toward the modern history of non-European peoples. The narrative denigrated Native Americans as being “averse to the habits of civilized life,” Arabs as “constitutionally addicted to war,” and Asians as having “enervated minds.”Footnote 86 From Robbins’s perspective, the chief cause of this was a lack of Christianity, as he claimed that contemporary learning was centered in the “Christian nations.”Footnote 87 Although the 1818 Goodrich edition was unique in some respects, the dismissive attitude toward the non-European and North American world was not. As the nineteenth century wore on, Tytler’s editors became ever more convinced of European (and North American) superiority, and their civilizational prejudice became increasingly imprinted into the evolving text.
The next major revision of Tytler’s text occurred in England, as the London-based publishing firm of Cadell & Davies commissioned Edward Nares in 1822 to write a third volume of Tytler’s original Elements of General History covering the history of the world until the death of King George III.Footnote 88 Like Tytler, Nares held a prestigious academic position—he was the Regius Professor of History at Oxford—yet has not attracted much attention from scholars as an original thinker.Footnote 89 Despite significant social, religious, and economic differences between the New England Congregationalist Robbins and the Anglican Oxford don Nares, they both shared similar positions when it came to the French Revolution. Nares blamed a lack of morality and religion as a major contributor to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, “did as much mischief to the cause of revealed religion, calling himself a Christian all the while, as the worst of his deistical contemporaries.”Footnote 90
The similarities and contrasts with Tytler’s original two-volume account are fascinating. Nares’s 1822 narrative focused on English history, dedicating far less attention to developments in Scotland than Tytler. Political and military history of various European states dominated the narrative, and only a single chapter on British India covered a non-European society. Following Tytler’s plan, the chronological coverage culminated in an assessment of the state of the arts and sciences in historical perspective, and here Nares demonstrated an expansive awareness of European cultural developments, but also a far more dismissive attitude toward the non-European world, North America included:
It is somewhat extraordinary, indeed, that this great and rapid advancement of knowledge has after all been confined to only a small portion of the globe…. In North America, also, the arts and sciences and literature may certainly be said to be in a progressive state, but under circumstances of rather slow and partial improvement…. Civilised Europe is the only part of the world that can claim credit of almost all that has been done towards the advancement of knowledge since the commencement of the eighteenth century, and only a few parts after all of civilized Europe itself.Footnote 91
Throughout the volume, Nares included content on the United States only in times of conflict with Great Britain, and not as an important “civilized” nation requiring its own consideration.
In a history of the publishing firm of Cadell & Davies, Theodore Besterman criticized what he saw as the firm’s overly generous payment to Nares for his work on the third volume, the end result of which was “not distinguished by much originality of thought” and “not up to the standard of the original text.”Footnote 92 Besterman’s only explanation for the firm’s decision was that the book “was a good and steady ‘seller’” which “continued so for a century.”Footnote 93 His assessment is typical of scholarly appraisals of Tytler and Nares, who are often faulted for a lack of literary or historical originality. Regardless, the publication of multiple editions by publishers in England, the United States, and Scotland indicates an eager demand for an updated and concisely written text that could be suitable as a work of reference or, with the proper alterations, for classroom use.
It took only a year for Nares’s continuation to make its way into an American textbook with a new edition that became the standard version of Tytler’s Elements of General History in the US until the 1840s.Footnote 94 The updated 1823 Isaac Hill edition was the first explicitly advertised as “adapted for the use of Schools and Academies.”Footnote 95 It included a truncated version of the continuation by Nares, as well as a set of questions for examination at the end to obviate the need for a companion volume. The new edition also contained an expanded section on the history of the United States. Neither Tytler nor Nares considered the United States significant in a work of universal history explicitly organized around “dominant” nations, so inserting a whole new section on US history was in and of itself a significant statement of the editors’ worldview. Indeed, the editors forcefully rebutted Nares’s dour assessment of American civilization, rhetorically asking: “Is it not acknowledged throughout Europe, that the United States of North America are not only farther advanced, but faster advancing, in the discoveries of science, and that their progress in literature is more rapid, than any other nation of the new world?”Footnote 96
Incorporating the new content from Nares’s continuation led to some strange and disjointed results in the 1823 Isaac Hill edition. This was most noticeable in the coverage of the American Revolution, where two distinctly nationalist accounts of the revolution from two different national contexts coexisted within a single American textbook. Nares’s depiction of the Revolution was modestly sympathetic to the American Revolutionaries, but far more concerned with Britain’s military standing in relation to other European powers.Footnote 97 The American editors, on the other hand, offered a more stridently nationalist tone. The Stamp Act was “obnoxious,” for instance, and the Intolerable Acts indicated that “property, liberty, and life were thus subject to ministerial caprice.”Footnote 98 That section concluded by saying that the US “delivered herself from a foreign dominion, and gained a rank among the nations of the world.”Footnote 99
The new editions of Elements of General History published by 1823 displayed growing nationalist sentiments in Britain and the United States. Though they shared a conservative and deeply religious view of the world, Robbins and Nares crafted narratives with distinct interpretations of the histories of their two countries. But though these differences were increasingly manifest, so, too, were their shared Protestant and chauvinistically Eurocentric assumptions about the world.
The Persistent Appeal of Elements of General History
From the mid-1820s through the early 1840s, modified and updated texts based on Elements of General History continued to be popular in both the United States and Britain. The American edition of 1844, published by John F. Brown, claimed to be the 135th edition of the work (Figure 4).Footnote 100 This section discusses the divergent fortunes of Tytler’s texts in the United States and Britain. The text was gradually displaced in American classrooms but continued to generate multiple new versions in Britain and Scotland until the midpoint of the century.
Title page of the 1849 edition of Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (John F. Brown, 1849), advertised as the 135th edition of the work. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Figure 4 Long description
ELEMENTS OF GENERAL HISTORY ANCIENT AND MODERN. BY ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER, F.R.S.E. Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh. To which is added, a succinct history of the United States, by an American gentleman. Supplying important omissions, bringing down the narration of events to the present time, and correcting manhy errors relative to the history of the country. With an improved table of Chronology; A comparative view of ancient and modern geography; and questions on each section. Adapted for the use of schools and academies. By an experienced teacher. One hundred and thirty-fifth edition. Concord, N.H. Published by John F. Brown. 1849.
By the late 1820s Tytler’s text began falling out of favor with leading educators in the United States, mostly due to the presence of newer American-made works deemed more appropriate for novice students. Joseph Emerson Worcester’s Elements of History, Ancient and Modern, with Historical Charts, published in 1826, became a particular favorite of American educators. Worcester’s major innovation was an extensive use of historical charts, modeled off those developed initially by Joseph Priestly, that would more easily help students to “trace the rise, progress, revolutions, decline, and fall of states and empires.”Footnote 101 In terms of content, Worcester selected topics based on his perception of what was “of the greatest importance, particularly to American students.”Footnote 102
In its endorsement of Worcester’s text, the influential North American Review offered an intriguing analysis of the General History marketplace of the 1820s. The reviewers acknowledged that Tytler’s work was “the first of its kind” and “manifests much diligent research, and a good deal of philosophical reflection,” and it accomplished its objectives “so much better than it had been done before, in a small compass.”Footnote 103 However, the reviewer suggested that it was too advanced for an elementary text, and that in some places the arrangement of materials was disconnected. A review in the American Journal of Education agreed, stating that Tytler was “a comprehensive and instructive author,” but “too philosophically profound for the youthful reader.”Footnote 104 What these two reviews have in common is an assessment that other works more readily met the specific pedagogical needs of American students at the elementary level. Newer and cheaper texts designed for the emerging common schools gradually displaced Tytler’s narrative, which was increasingly seen as comparatively inaccessible.Footnote 105 Notably, the critiques were not leveled on nationalist grounds implying that the content was unsuitable for Americans, or that only American authors should be assigned in American classrooms.
With Worcester’s Elements of History, Ancient and Modern (1826), Emma Willard’s A System of Universal History, in Perspective (1835), and the successful publication of Samuel Goodrich’s Peter Parley’s Common School History (1838), the marketplace for General History textbooks became far more competitive by the 1830s.Footnote 106 Nevertheless, Tytler’s text remained popular in that decade, and it took until the 1840s for the book to be displaced at Harvard and Yale.Footnote 107 Multivolume versions of Tytler’s work, including Americanized versions of European editions, continued to be popular works of reference.Footnote 108 While American authors gradually took over the marketplace for the common schools, it was a European text, François Guizot’s The History of Civilization in Europe, that replaced Tytler’s Elements of General History in American higher education, indicating the continued acceptability and popularity of European world histories well into the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote 109
In Britain, new versions of Tytler’s work continued to appear, the most ambitious of which was the expansion of the original to six volumes, now entitled Universal History, from the Creation of the World to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century, originally published in 1834, and shepherded through by William Fraser Tytler, Alexander Fraser’s son.Footnote 110 By design, the six-volume work was not nearly as concise as the original edition from 1801, and the new multivolume edition remained committed to chronological coverage extending only to the early eighteenth century. As a result, the work did not mitigate what many educators had long viewed as the shortcomings of the original. However, the multivolume edition of the work proliferated in sets of reference texts in school and family libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, the six-volume work was included in Murray’s Family Library in 1834.Footnote 111 In the United States, Tytler’s Universal History became the longest multivolume work in Harper’s Family and School District Libraries, which gained national popularity in the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote 112 Despite the challenges with the multivolume work, several revised single-volume Scottish and English editions of Elements of General History were published by 1850.Footnote 113 This was likely due to the closure of the publishing firm Cadell & Davies in the late 1830s, and the fact that the work was no longer protected in Britain by copyright.Footnote 114 One of these single-volume editions was part of Whittaker’s Popular Library, a series that cheaply printed out-of-copyright works for a mass audience.Footnote 115 Much like earlier editors of the work, Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, a London legal writer, set out to make two sets of changes: updating Tytler’s scholarship, and bringing the historical narration to the contemporary moment (Figures 5 and 6). To accomplish the first objective, Tomlins made important in-text notations with information from nineteenth-century historians such as Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Henry Hallam, and James Mackintosh, as well as new travel accounts from throughout the British Empire.Footnote 116 With the updated historical narration, Tomlins espoused an unabashedly pro-British worldview. Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars, according to Tomlins, “entitled her to be styled the liberatrix of Europe.”Footnote 117 Tomlins decried the “despotic” aims of the Holy Alliance, and praised Britain’s turn toward liberal policies in the 1840s.Footnote 118 The patriotism espoused by Tomlins is in line with scholarship on the formation of British nationalism in the nineteenth century, yet what is interesting here is that authors in the United States as well as England and Scotland could so easily retrofit an eighteenth-century Scottish historical narrative to fit evolving nationalist priorities half a century later.
Title page and advertisement for the 1844 Whittaker Edition of Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (Whittaker and Co., 1844).
Figures 5 Long description
Title page, General history, Ancient and Modern, edited by Thomas Edlyne Tomlins (London: Whittaker and Co., 1844).
Title page and advertisement for the 1844 Whittaker Edition of Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (Whittaker and Co., 1844).
Figure 6 Long description
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE PRESENT EDITION. This page is from a printed book, featuring a centered all-caps heading. The text is organized in single-column justified paragraphs. The advertisement explains the revisions and continuation of a universal history text. Key excerpts include: 'This work now presented to the public has long been in repute as a standard treatise of Universal History...' and 'The additions to the present edition, in consequence of the original work having been nearly exhausted, have been made with great care and attention...' The page concludes with a signature line: 'Thomas Edlyne Tomlins. Cheltenham, June 1, 1844.'.
While this article focuses on the publication and dissemination of Tytler’s work within mostly Anglo-Protestant educational circles, the reception to Tytler’s work in multiple contexts requires further investigation. Christina Snyder has shown, for instance, that students of the Choctaw Academy, a federal Indigenous boarding school in Kentucky, read Tytler’s text against the grain as they participated “in a transatlantic and transhistorical conversation to articulate a more empowering narrative of both American and global history.”Footnote 119 The work was translated into Hindi in 1829, and to Japanese in 1871, indicating a broader global readership than is possible to assess in the scope of a single article.Footnote 120 The publication of many editions and hundreds of printings over a span of several decades indicates a large reading audience that likely understood the work in ways that would have been surprising to Tytler and his legion of editors.
The significant editorial revisions made in successive editions of Elements of General History indicate a shared concern for an updated and relevant textbook that kept pace with contemporary trends in historical scholarship. But the work’s reputation as a quality and accessible world history led to its sustained popularity in schools and as a work of reference. Editions of Tytler’s texts, either as single or multivolume sets, remained in print in the United States until at least 1860, in Scotland to at least the year 1872, and in England until at least 1875.Footnote 121 The work had a longer shelf life as a schoolbook in England and Scotland than it did in the United States, but it is clear that generations of educators and scholars saw the value in the concise and systematic approach of Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern.
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated the enduring educational appeal of a singular work of history across much of the nineteenth century in the United States, England, and Scotland. To return to my opening questions: In an era of rising American nationalism, how can we best explain the continued popularity in US classrooms of a Scottish author whose works very clearly centered European history and frequently praised Britain, a nation with whom the US had recently fought two wars? And what do the many editions of this work tell us about evolving views on world history in Britain and the United States? Tytler was a respected and trusted educational source whose work resonated with an American readership. As publishers and educators creatively adapted the work in the United States, they made alterations they felt necessary to appeal to an American audience, including the insertion of new research, enhanced coverage of national history, and the addition of religious content. But they also largely accepted Tytler’s characterization of the world’s history, particularly in the ancient and early modern eras. Even in depictions of the modern world, editors on both sides of the Atlantic mostly differed only on particular moments of British and American history, and only occasionally bothered to alter content in other areas.
Centering the subject of General History and a text like Tytler’s, therefore, supports the findings of historians of education who have stressed the growing presence of nationalist content in nineteenth-century history teaching, but also reveals a shared transatlantic vision for human history among Anglo-Protestant educators in multiple national contexts.Footnote 122 This shared vision framed universal history as a story of the progressive development of Europe, depicted as the apotheosis of human civilization. As expressed by Tytler and his many editors, civilizational chauvinism necessitated ignoring or marginalizing the history of much of the human population in the process.
The proliferation of schoolbook universal history was compatible with the nineteenth-century use of history teaching as an engine of nationalism. American editors and educators claimed themselves as heirs to a grand tradition of European historical progress by quite literally inserting the United States into the narrative, thereby co-opting and adapting the Enlightenment-era tradition of universal history into a story of America’s glorious historical emergence. This analysis of Tytler’s text demonstrates that a civilizational framing of world history during the foundational moments of world history teaching in the US served a complementary function to the ideology of American exceptionalism.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Stephen Jackson is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas (KU). His work focuses on imperial and settler colonial education, and his most recent book is The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools (Routledge, 2022). He wishes to thank KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities for supporting this project with a Resident Faculty Fellowship, and the HEQ reviewers and editors for their thoughtful suggestions for improvement.
