Anyone care to pick out bias, inaccuracy or flat out untruths throughout this State of Alabama 1970s History textbook?
I would hate to sift through the book in its entirety; the pages C.L. Smith posted are problematic enough. Samples of the book are visible here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/unclaimedmysteries/6393237801/in/album-72157628123504813/
Take the first image, for example, of the cotton gin. The text highlights the labor saving and profitability of the device, ignoring the very clear fact that those profiting from the machine were not the same as those operating it (one of the base critiques of capitalism in general), made especially obvious in the accompanying photo - the labor here being performed by slaves.
Rather than "save labor" as the book suggests, the cotton gin allowed for massive amounts of cotton to be processed in a very short amount of time - which meant, to wealthy whites, that the spatial and labor requirements of raising and harvesting the cotton could and should be raised as well. Instead of paying workers for their labor, these individuals relied on unpaid slave labor. While the cotton gin is celebrated in the textbook, the truth is that this and other forms of mechanization and mass labor meant that wealth was concentrated in the hands of increasingly few individuals - and that those individuals viewed human bondage as a way to maximize their profits.
As much, if not more, can be said of the other biases of the textbook, which include in immensely problematic view of slavery as "an early form of social security" - echoing slaveholder's language of paternalism over a century earlier. Slaveholders, thanks to socially constructed ideas of scientific racism and a desire to make themselves feel better about what they were doing, tried to argue that blacks were incapable of taking care of themselves and required whites to function/uplift them. It also allowed them to believe that the rape, murder, and other terrors that were inflicted on these people were somehow excused because of their inhumanity and lesser status.
As the textbook indicates, these arguments persisted well after slavery was officially ended, and many still cling to these beliefs despite clear and substantiated evidence to the contrary. Sadly, some still attempt to make this argument even today, even in academia (the acolytes of the late Eugene Genovese, for example).
Overall, the textbook shows just how recently absolutely false and problematic statements and assumptions about the era of slavery were being made - and shows part of the reason why many might still cling to these ideas, believing them to be true, today.