The Racist History Books I Read As A Kid [Long Shorts]

"All these cultures were notorious thieves; and you can learn about them at the British Museum"

"Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor - except in Ireland - cruel" 😅😅

The stuff about East India Company depends on how you understand "greatest". If you mean "scope, sheer scale", then it could be said unironically

Most of my Ladybird books were published in the more enlightened 80s and cover such important historical figures and events as He-Man, Lion-O and the evacuation of Cybertron.

There were other books like that back in those days. In 1952, when I was barely 11, I had just started secondary school. I found a book in the school's library about the indigenous people, 'aborigines', in Australia. The (presumably) white English author was at pains to describe just how 'primitive' they were. One of his examples was how they acquired honey, not by going to a grocery shop, like 'civilized' people, but by catching a bee, painting it white, and following it to its (wild) hive. Upon reading this, I was blown away by such a bloody miraculous tracking skill.

I remember these ladybird books. What you have to know here is, this was the squeaky clean history at the time it was taught in British schools in the 1950s and 60s, the time when I was at school. Everything was either bad (nasty natives) or good (British Empire, hurrah!). Nothing in between. A lot of important stuff was even simply ignored. For instance, that Scotland was a country and not part of England was never mentioned. The same for Wales. We, the English, were always the good guys. Everybody else were untrustworthy foreigners.

I had thought Lawrence du Garde Peach might be a (fabulous) house name that Ladybird staff writers used, but he was an actual author and playwright. Wrote for movies, radio and many plays geared to amateur theatrics. Might make an interesting topic for a short: served in military intelligence in World War I, a Liberal Party candidate in 1929, and earned an OBE (services for literature) in 1972.

The east India company being one of the greatest companies ever where great means big true - where great means good not so much.

Proper updates for these books would be lovely, much more appealing than the adult aimed parodies that they keep putting out.

Oh my goodness, you've just unlocked my memories of reading these books at school and in libraries during the 70s and 80s. I hadn't realised where so many of my assumptions about history have come from! I remember the Captain Cook and Easter Island pictures particularly. Because I was so young reading these, there was no question that they held the absolute truth.

As an American born in the early 1960’s, I can confirm this was how history was taught to me as a child, but then I grew up…and learned to read other things besides sanitized textbooks.

Some current kids rhymes have extremely dark backgrounds based on torture and outrageous practices, and we wouldn't even expect such connections!

I may be wrong but I thought that 'negro' was simply the correct term for dark-skinned Africans at this time, in the same way we say 'black'. After all, all through the civil rights era in the States, black Americans from MLK down referred to themselves as such. It's jarring to our modern ears but was it as offensive at the time?

The East India Company was objectively "great," but that isn't synonymous with "good" or "ethical."

Chuckles at 'Red Indian'. Being Indigenous to the Americas, I don't think I've ever seen a 'red' person in my life.

I remember reading these, but the worst shock I had was when I was reading Pippi Longstocking to my children and finding the 'natives' bowing down to the white people because they 'wanted them' to be their rulers! Obviously that had completely gone over my head when I first read it as a child.

In a far corner of my school library there was a 1909 book called, roughly translated, “The Triumph of the White Race across the Globe.” Yeah. This was in the 90s. We were a heavily left-leaning hippie school who did themed weeks about Native American culture and spent history class discussing the horrors of colonialism. I choose to believe it ended up in the library by mistake (there wasn’t a database or a real librarian, it was just a book collection stuffed into a room) was only still in the library because I was the only kid nerdy enough to even find it. 😂

2:00 as a African American/Black male from American, I can promise you that's not the worst version of that word. In fact it's probably the best and least offense, at least in my opinion.

Re-reading Robinson Crusoe as an adult was eye-openning to say the least.

I'm a USian, so we didn't get Ladybird books - what we got were very VERY racist depictions of Native Americans in our equivalent. My mom was a history major and thoroughly searched my books for inaccuracies, hence why I got the engineering and cultural history ones with model tipis, medieval European convents with the sides cut out to show the rooms, and showing how the Pyramids were actually built, by enslaved people sliding bricks along with water.