Between 1845 and 1847, Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870) and Marcius Willson (1813–1905), each an author of common school histories of the United States, engaged in a furious pamphlet controversy, dubbed “the war of histories” in the trade press, after Willson publicly criticized Willard and seven other leading history text authors for sloppy writing, misdated events, factual errors, and poor organization. Willard, the only one to respond, counterattacked with assertions that Willson had plagiarized her works, misstated her purposes, lacked the moral authority or scholarly reputation to be an educator, and arrogated to himself the supreme authority to judge another author's style or determine the truth or falsehood of accounts that were still matters of dispute among respectable historians. True to form, the conflict descended into personal insults and gender-baiting, but it does not appear to have had much impact on their careers and therefore could be taken as a tempest in a teapot. It has attracted the attention of subsequent historians of education due to Willard's fame as a public intellectual, pioneer in history and geography education, and advocate of female education, plus the fact that Willson's detailed critique of a group of writers by name was the first of its kind. It was also a rare public argument over how to “compile” a history textbook for children just as the common school reform movement peaked before the Civil War.

Willson's criticism came in the form of a report commissioned by the New Jersey Society of Teachers and Friends of Education at the same time that he was preparing his own competing text in American history. The conflict of interest inherent in writing a review of one's rivals without disclosing plans for bringing a new text to market cast a shadow over Willson's criticisms that darkened further when, a few months after the 1845 report appeared, his new text emerged and cited the review as proof of the book's “superior accuracy” over the competition. Eighteen months later, his New York publisher raised the stakes even further, reprinting the review in a promotional pamphlet for Willson's new text and distributing two thousand copies to school districts and booksellers across the country, in direct competition with Willard's popular histories. This behavior exposed Willson to charges of self-dealing and deception that continue to shape modern treatments of the debate, which tend to dismiss his arguments as special pleading by an ambitious rival out to disparage the competition. In these accounts, Willard's defense of her methods, literary property, and academic integrity play a starring role, scripted with the scorching pen of an experienced advocate and scholar.Footnote ¹

Later scholars’ deference to Willard is understandable, given both her record of accomplishment and Willson's apparent misconduct. Coverage of this debate, however, has suffered not only from a dearth of information about Willson (he has no biographer and his papers do not appear to have survived, while Willard's are available and the foundation of a rich literature) but also a tendency to let the clash of personalities and material interests overshadow a debate about historical method in an increasingly commercialized market for school histories. Their debate about matters of style and accuracy that today are settled in-house before publication revealed what might be termed the “compiler's dilemma”—the schoolbook author's ambiguous position as amateur and professional in the conflicted no-man's land between scholarship and commerce—in an era short on rigorous scholarship and long on popular demand for simple, reliable truths in children's classrooms. Their debate not only revealed disagreements over best practices in history education, it also underlined the transition in the 1840s from a genteel Romantic tradition in education and history to a market-oriented, empiricist, and entrepreneurial ethos that scholars tend to date later, during or after the Civil War. Willard and Willson were not carbon copies of the other textbook authors targeted in his critique; their contributions to a genre often pigeonholed by many scholars as a virtually interchangeable set of nationalist nostrums were unique, as their debate and subsequent careers would reveal.

What did publishers, authors, teachers, and the public expect a history schoolbook to say and accomplish? Did accuracy matter, how could it be verified, and did it establish trust in an account? Could a pattern of minor errors still convey a larger and more important truth? How was a compilation for schoolchildren and families different from a scholarly history? Willson's critique of Willard was not just a ham-handed lunge at a rival in order to win business for his own wares (school Readers, not history books, would be the foundation of Willson's substantial fortune). It was a novice's brash critique of a genre of history writing that was already crowded with look-alikes in need of clearer standards and an adjusted sense of purpose. The duel was not itself a turning point in the story of history education; it was instead a mile marker in the secularization and professionalization of the craft, illustrating a shift from “compilation” to “synthesis” as textbook compilers like Willson and Willard adapted to the mass markets and political (especially sectional) pressures that determined sales.Footnote ² In short, Willson was more than an ambitious rival and the debate was a sign of things to come.

The controversy occurred at a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century historiography, amid literary turmoil over defining originality in scholarship. A broad reinvention of historical method was underway by the 1840s, away from both Enlightenment and, later, Romantic notions of history as a literary art toward Victorian emphases on science, racial determinism, empiricism, historicism, and deeper criticism of sources. Willard and Willson both believed that history is a “science,” but this term was undergoing significant change under the impact of German and French historiography and philosophy in the 1830s and 1840s. German idealism's and French positivism's enthronement of scientific method and their corresponding skepticism of biblical chronology and divine direction of human affairs challenged the providential and millennial pivot of schoolbook historiography at the center of Willard's historical vision, offering Willson an alternative framework for understanding the past.Footnote ³

The quarrel was also a rare public clash between the authors of history schoolbooks, intensified by the rising stakes of a growing market. Occasional disputes over plagiarism and authorship in history had burst onto the literary scene after the enactment of copyright legislation in the 1790s, but none of these delved into the process of text writing and sourcing with the passion and depth of the Willard–Willson feud over school “compends.”Footnote ⁴ Examined against a changing backdrop of common school reform and innovations in mass marketing and publishing, the controversy reveals a transition from the amateur literary enterprises of early national schoolbook writers to the more market-oriented, sophisticated profession of history text authorship and publishing before the Civil War.

The career paths of these two authors defined different mindsets that influenced their books and their dispute. They were literally from different genders and generations and came of age during different epochs in the early American republic. Willard (fifty-eight) was twenty-six years older than Willson (thirty-two) when he critiqued her work in 1845. Her most significant publications and achievements as an author, pedagogue, reformer, and institution builder already adorned her remarkable résumé, while Willson's reputation was “yet to be made,” as Willard dryly observed.Footnote ⁵ Born in 1787, she was a child of the Revolutionary era and the late Enlightenment, raised in a time, historian Anne Firor Scott reminds us, of “active institution building” and redefining of women's position in the young republic.Footnote ⁶ Determined from an early age to mitigate the disparities in male and female education, she combined pioneering scholarship in geography and history education with institution building in female education through her famous Troy Female Seminary (established 1821). As she wrote in 1833, the graduates of her school were to exemplify the “well educated female bringing all her faculties into exercise in the performance of the appropriate duties of her sex, as mistress of a household, as a wife and mother.” Her life's goal was “to prepare the rising generation of women for these important duties, and to bring forward teachers to aid me in this.”Footnote ⁷”

Willard's pioneering publications applied her teaching philosophy to curriculum, with characteristic attention to detail. Her pedagogy mixed new with familiar concepts about the way children learn, and by itself did not attract significant controversy among educators.Footnote ⁸ But she infused her geographies and histories with innovative visuals—“progressive” maps and graphic organizers—intended to stimulate students to draft their own maps as mnemonic devices associated with dates and events, a kind of primitive constructivism.Footnote ⁹

Dedicated to “religion, virtue, and human rights,”Footnote ¹⁰ Willard's historical works departed little from the romantic historiographical mainstream of the early American republic, and over their long publishing history they displayed little evidence of substantial philosophical development. Their deeply religious tone, patriotic celebration of American exceptionalism, and concern with producing steady republican citizens were familiar themes to readers of early national schoolbooks. We have little evidence that she took the opportunity afforded by extensive travel or through her otherwise wide reading in history to incorporate the ideas and findings of European historians who were already influencing the authors (like George Bancroft) she relied on for her compends. It is remarkable that an author so well versed in new ideas of geography and education displayed so little interest in emergent historiography, but the reason is not far to seek. The secularism of positivist and historicist intellectuals ran counter to her religious convictions, which were not open to question. “I will not reinvestigate the evidences of Christianity,” she upbraided a querulous Robert Owen in 1831. “I will never change my belief.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet two significant exceptions distinguished her histories from the seven others on Willson's hit list: first, their emphasis on the status of women as “the main test of civilizations,”Footnote ¹² and second, their linkage to the classroom. Like other antebellum female authors of history, Willard brought women into the American story wherever she could, even as she highlighted the heroic achievements and spectacular failures in politics, commerce, warfare, and philosophy of men “who are to history, as cities are to geography, its luminous points.”Footnote ¹³ Here were two significant themes that united Willard's American and world histories: the rise of Christianity, which paralleled progress in women's social condition, and the United States as the culmination of these developments so long as its racial and political order remained intact. Willard also stood out in this group as a lifelong teacher who specifically connected her works to “plans of teaching” at a school of her making, detailed them in her schoolbooks, promoted them in essays for magazines and educational journals, and toured the country to carry them out.Footnote ¹⁴

Willson, by contrast, was a newcomer to the classroom, a novice writer, and relatively unschooled as a historian before he wrote his report. Born in 1813 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Willson was barely six years old when Willard unveiled her ambitious Plan for Improvement of Female Education; her first Geography appeared when he was eleven, her famous Republic of America when he was fifteen, three years before he enrolled as a young scholar at Canandaigua Academy, in Ontario County, New York. The Willsons had established a family farm at Allen's Hill in that county, where Marcius grew up and attended local schools in Geneseo. In 1835, when Willard's first edition of her Universal History appeared, Willson was a junior at Union College in Schenectady, New York. In sum, like Willard and most history compilers of the day, Willson had not formally studied history before he decided to write it. His first publication in the field came in 1843, when he copyrighted A Comprehensive Chart of American History, which was later incorporated into his first history texts.Footnote ¹⁵ Willson also lacked Willard's deep experience in the classroom. Whereas, by 1845, Willard had been working in educational institutions for over thirty-five years, Willson's prior teaching experience had consisted of six-and-a-half years at various small academies in upstate New York and New Jersey.Footnote ¹⁶

This capsule reprise of the authors’ careers suggests that in March 1845 the match appears to have been quite uneven. In accusing eight established history schoolbook authors of defective work, Willson took great risks and, later scholars have concluded, suffered a tongue-lashing in return. No one since seems to have asked why he did this except to make room for a new text. But why did he think the country needed another American history schoolbook in the first place?

One possible explanation, and it must be circumstantial given the absence so far of Willson's private correspondence, is that, as a group, the existing schoolbook histories constituted an ideological echo chamber and, if one is to believe contemporary opinion, were seriously deficient in literary reputation and historical accuracy.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps the market would welcome a new voice, and if so, then Willson's critique was not just of Willard but of all eight authors. The histories Willard, the Goodrich brothers, Salma Hale, John Frost, William Grimshaw, Jesse Olney, and Noah Webster wrote in the 1820s—all critiqued in Willson's review—were unmistakably alike in treating history education as instruction in moral conscience and civic virtue.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, these authors, although competing in regional markets, rarely advertised their books before the 1840s, and unlike other historians who quarreled openly, never disparaged each other's works in public or specifically characterized themselves as “rivals.” Although not interchangeable, and even considering Willard's unique contributions, their works displayed many similarities in organization, selection of events, style, and narrative development that offered an opportunity for a more comprehensive national history sanitized of the local and religious biases of their earlier editions. In an expanding market, they were an inviting target.Footnote ¹⁹ And perhaps Willson assumed that the relative disparity between his and Willard's gender could compensate for the huge gap between his thin record and Willard's remarkable résumé.

But if Willson was not to challenge these works’ common master narrative, and if the available sources for a school history were limited, how could he get his intellectual footing in this market? Like any budding author, he researched his competitors to develop a strategy, an opportunity that arose with the New Jersey educational society commission in 1844 to review them.Footnote ²⁰ He labored over the document during the winter, consulting at least forty separate published primary and secondary sources in addition to the history texts he decided to review. Given the absence of citations to help trace sources in the vast majority of school histories, this was a mammoth task.Footnote ²¹ That this research served the dual purpose of judging his rivals and informing his upcoming text was hardly controversial or deceptive in itself. But even though his Newark listeners knew that he was an instructor at nearby Newark Academy, his failure to disclose his publishing plans or his qualifications as a reviewer of school histories in his presentation or in the report's later published forms could, and did, raise suspicions about the impartiality and integrity of his report.

Willson fired the opening shots of the “war of histories” on Friday afternoon, March 7, 1845, in a presentation of his Report on Common School Histories to a meeting of the New Jersey Society of Teachers and Friends of Education in the lecture room of the First Presbyterian Church of Newark, New Jersey. According to the local press, this “full and apparently impartial review of some of the most popular American Histories now in use,” demonstrated that “they are in several respects unpardonably defective.”Footnote ²² At the conclusion of the presentation, the group voted unanimously for its publication.Footnote ²³ Six weeks later, Willson surfaced, along with other authors, during the new textbook showcase at the April meeting of the New York County and District School Superintendents in Syracuse, where Willard was being feted for her progressive stance on female education and women's broader role in overseeing schools, to announce his upcoming American history text as a corrective to current volumes on the market.Footnote ²⁴ In July, the first twenty-three pages of the report appeared as “A Critical Review of American Common School Histories by M. Willson” in the Biblical Repository and Classical Review, a little-known periodical devoted to religious and literary commentary.Footnote ²⁵

Willson's critique adopted a tone of royal omniscience that mixed meticulous research with pompous pedantry, amply displaying the author's immaturity as a historian. He arraigned recent editions of the eight most popular school histories along four criteria: Arrangement, Anachronisms, Accuracy, and Literary Merits. With unwitting irony, he admitted that “the task that we have undertaken is, of itself, a delicate one; and the more so, from the circumstance, that the reviewer exposes himself to become the reviewed.”Footnote ²⁶ Although no author escaped unscathed, Willard took the brunt of Willson's censure; both her Republic of America and its 1844 school edition received withering criticism for the majority of “more than TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY ERRORS[emphasis in the original] ” he claimed to have uncovered.Footnote ²⁷

After a brief and unsophisticated section on the works’ thematic organization, followed by a bland acknowledgement that Willard and Samuel Goodrich had filled a gap by including maps in their texts, Willson hit his stride in a long lecture on “anachronisms” that focused entirely on the texts’ failure to render pre-Revolution dates consistently in New as opposed to Old Style, a problem for any historian working in American colonial history.Footnote ²⁸ Much of this discussion concentrated on the misdating of events not by school histories but by their common sources: works by George Bancroft, Abiel Holmes, Jeremy Belknap, William Trumbull, and many others. The implication was clear: text authors who carelessly incorporated those sources were perpetuating errors that confused teachers and students.Footnote ²⁹

Willson then fact-checked ten “errors, whether of ignorance or of carelessness, into which we believe they have fallen,” pledging to “quote from all our prominent school histories indiscriminately.”Footnote ³⁰ He examined dates, locations, or events in colonial history found in all of the histories under review, pausing to detail two found in Willard's, by noting mismatches between the schoolbooks and their sources. Willson's use of authorities was uneven; in most cases, he cited original authors (most frequently Bancroft) and page numbers, in others he breezily waved the reader to unnamed “authorities of repute” or “all modern writers” concerning “well-known” facts.Footnote ³¹ An “error,” in Willson's mind, was defined by departure from a source. He did not accuse anyone of fabricating history, nor did he suggest they conduct original research; their sin was inconsistency with the common sources compilers used to construct their schoolbook accounts and a failure to correct subsequent editions on the basis of new accounts. The distinction was vital.

Turning to literary technique, Willson singled out Willard's school history in six dense pages of stylistic denunciation—street language, substitution of nominative “who” for the accusative “whom,” poor syntax, questionable word choices, abuses of “neither/nor, either/or,” dangling modifiers, and other writing sins—checking them off with a victorious air of condescension and faux astonishment at the contrast between the press's effusive praise of her books’ literary quality and the trail of mistakes he claimed to uncover.Footnote ³² Willson's acute focus on Willard in this portion of his pamphlet is the most important evidence we have that she was his ultimate target, even though he later claimed that this was because her works had far more errors than the others.Footnote ³³ Another consideration is the greater time required to research, compile, and detail errors of eight authors instead of reviewing just Willard's. Regardless, singling her out for literary faults left the clear impression that her books were highest on his list of targets.

Nowhere did Willson's syllabus of errors challenge the providential, patriotic themes in any of these works. Nor did the essay weigh the authors’ arguments within a larger historiographical or educational context. Acting more like a proofreader than a reviewer, he targeted the failures of both publishers and authors. His critique also assumed that a pattern of mistakes corrupted a story by departing from true accounts derived from “original” sources. We have no direct evidence that Willson was familiar with the source-driven criticism underlying German historiography in the dawning age of Leopold von Ranke, but his emphasis on precision in sourcing suggests something like it at work, even though at no point did he suggest that these “errors” significantly altered any author's larger version of the American pageant, including Willard's focus on women in history.Footnote ³⁴ Little wonder that in her first reply to him Willard asked why he had said “nothing” of “the diffusive glow of patriotic, moral, and religious feeling which pervades” her histories while he focused instead on minor errors of dates, grammar, and style.Footnote ³⁵

Despite its caustic tone, the report caused barely a ripple in educational circles. Willard later claimed she didn't know about it even after hearing Willson—“to me in every way a total stranger”—make a “great pretence” of concern in Syracuse over dates in school history texts and pursue “preposterous” criticisms of “the school histories of the country” under a “false standard of his own making.”Footnote ³⁶ Preposterous or not, as we have noted, three months after Willson's appearance in Syracuse, the extract appeared in the Biblical Repository and a full version, according to Willson, circulated as a pamphlet in New York City.Footnote ³⁷ To Willson's way of thinking, the absence of any reference to his upcoming book proved the review was impartial. That, however, is not how Willard read it, especially when in September, Caleb Bartlett, a small publisher and book dealer in New York City, issued Willson's History of the United States for the Use of Schools. In its Introduction, Willson the author cited his own review as proof of his book's “superior accuracy,” with special attention to “a uniformity in the system of dates … being given throughout in New Style.”Footnote ³⁸ The book's preface also highlighted its unique “chart” of American history, along with various maps and commentary sprinkled throughout the text.Footnote ³⁹ This suspicious sequence of events cast a shadow on Willson's impartiality that would follow him throughout the ensuing controversy. Sometime “later that summer,” Willard recalled, she received copies of Willson's criticism and his text and set to work on a reply.Footnote ⁴⁰

But why reply? Why not follow the example of the other seven authors, ignore this young, obscure critic, silently correct any genuine errors, and get on with her work? Her surviving papers are silent on the matter. She wisely demurred on her friends’ advice to sue for literary theft, perhaps because recent high-profile cases of plagiarism had raised, but not resolved, the problem of originality, fair use, and copying.Footnote ⁴¹ Maybe such cautionary thoughts explain the restrained nature of her reply in the October issue of the Biblical Repository, under the pseudonym “X. Y.” in order to “avoid controversy.” Striking a theme, she pointed to the publication of a new history “by a gentleman, who, being about to publish one himself, very naturally seeks to destroy public confidence in his rivals, and that the most strenuously where the most annoyance is apprehended.” Much of this short essay was an extended quotation from an anonymous male “friend” (a maneuver to avoid legal repercussions, lend male authority to her defense, and avoid a direct and public female challenge to a male), who attacked Willson's motives and accused him of imitation, if not outright piracy. Further concealing herself, and presumably her gender, in the pseudonymous persona of a historian, she cited authorities to support her version of historical events, asserted that Willson misinterpreted her abridged history's organizational structure, and cited Webster's dictionary to refute his nitpicking about grammar, usage, and style. Many of the historical “errors” he identified concerned matters still unsettled by historians, she said. As to dates, “it matters as little whether the day kept in honor of the Pilgrims’ landing, is or is not the actual anniversary, as it does whether Christmas, which is celebrated by so great a part of Christendom, is or is not the real anniversary of our Lord's nativity. If the events, with their consequences, be duly and gratefully apprehended, that is all which is essential.” Modern chronographers and historians, she wrote, considered the exact dating of long-distant events a “matter of small importance.”Footnote ⁴²

Willson did not immediately answer. Instead, over the next sixteen months, the two authors busied themselves with writing and promotional pursuits, deepening their collaboration with publishers who were becoming increasingly aggressive in the schoolbook trade. The market changed as the emerging district system inserted committees into the process of selecting texts for parents to buy; these leaders became the targets of persistent marketing by publishers who plied them for adoptions and endorsements. Publishers resorted to disparaging the competition with implied comparisons asserting that the latest edition was the “best” available.”Footnote ⁴³ The center of gravity for educational publishing shifted from Boston—“the scepter has departed from Judah,” Samuel Goodrich lamented in 1856—to New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cincinnati (where Willard and Willson battled for adoption).Footnote ⁴⁴ To the authors who first published in the 1820s, the mid-1840s was different from a genteel era in which such texts were the basis of a livelihood in children's literature. Now authors and their publishers criticized their rivals openly, vigorously fought for new markets, and redefined their audience as having more specific instructional needs. Reputations would rely more upon the penetration of new markets and impressive sales figures than upon the accolades of a circle of common school reformers. A discourse of professional practice that redefined conceptions of children's learning styles germinated in the normal school movement, new teacher institutes, and new educational periodicals.Footnote ⁴⁵ The marriage of stereotyping technology and the steam press in publishing by the 1840s, which enabled faster and more accurate duplication of texts in cheaper editions, transformed the publishing business.Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition, the day's headlines heightened public interest in—and exerted pressure on textbook publishers to address—the historical background of sectional conflict, territorial expansion, and a brewing controversy with Mexico over Texas.Footnote ⁴⁷ The compiling of schoolbooks now required more than scissors, paste, and a bookshelf of first-generation historical literature; compilers had to blend entrepreneurship with scholarship that would be attentive to “contemporary history,” new audiences, and changing intellectual currents. The stakes had gone up, for after all the minds of the nation's youth—and the profits of publishers and authors—were at risk.Footnote ⁴⁸

Willard's publisher, Alfred S. Barnes, studied his competitors, sensed these trends, and built his shop into a formidable supplier of schoolbooks, while Willard left New York in March 1846 for a long tour of the southwestern states to meet with former pupils, proselytize the cause of female education, and promote her books, which she continued to write and publish.Footnote ⁴⁹ Her contemporary admirer and biographer, John Lord, describes the mid-1840s as a period of contentment after her successful divorce of a second, abusive husband, physician Christopher Yates, and the publication of her landmark Temple of Time, also in 1846. Meanwhile, she denounced Willson to school superintendents as a “book-thief” who “falsely aspersed” and “pirated” her abridged history.Footnote ⁵⁰

In early 1847, buoyed by intelligence that teachers in New York City were “all well pleased with” her books and “exceedingly anxious to throw out everything else, and use [Willard's] Histories, exclusively [emphasis in original],”Footnote ⁵¹ Barnes retitled Mrs. Willard's School Histories as Mrs. Willard's Series of School Histories and Charts, including recently revised editions of her Republic of America, the Abridged History of the United States, System of Universal History in Perspective, her American Chronographer, and the Temple of Time issued as a two-by-three-foot wall chart. Along with her existing atlases, geographies, and chronographers, this library of social studies works for all grade levels made Willard a formidable market force.Footnote ⁵²

Her nemesis was also busy. Just after he published the “Critical Review,” Willson returned to Allen's Hill to work on graded school editions of his history that, by early 1847, were bearing profitable results. At six-hundred-plus pages, his new American History (1847) was the cornerstone of his other histories of the country. He had left Bartlett for Mark H. Newman & Co., of New York City, which had just partnered with Henry Ivison of Auburn, New York, a specialist in the schoolbook trade. Ivison and Newman then issued Willson's Historical Series that included his new American History, a “juvenile” edition for primary schools, his History of the United States for Schools, a Comprehensive Chart of American History “on rollers” and an associated guide, with a universal history text in progress.Footnote ⁵³

The marketing blitz for Willson's package poked a hornet's nest over in Troy when, early in 1847, Newman issued a pamphlet with Willson's New Jersey “Critical Review” carefully retitled as a Report on American Histories, including a full-page explanation of the report's provenance and an appendix of eight more pages detailing dozens more “errors” in common school history texts, all framed by back- and front-page ads for Willson's texts.Footnote ⁵⁴ That effort, with a slew of supporting advertisements in the commercial and educational press, raised the stakes just after Willard had returned from her tour and Barnes had rejuvenated his New York publishing house. None of her other competitors had mounted such an aggressive campaign of criticisms, distributed en masse to school districts and booksellers in the Northeast and Midwest, which threatened to blunt the commercial success of Willard's thirty-year campaign to reform history and geography education. At this point, Willson's focus on Willard's “errors” amplified the threat from this new rival and gave the matter of their different genders even greater salience. Did Willson choose Willard as his primary target because he thought she was easy pickings, the weakest among the eight authors, who, as a woman, could not or would not defend herself against a male author? Modern observers can reasonably infer from both his language and the attention to her work in the initial report, as well as his later claim that her books were less popular than those of Hale and Goodrich, that the answer was yes.Footnote ⁵⁵ By criticizing subjective matters like style and obsessing over technical issues like the accuracy of dates, Willson established terms of the debate that placed her on the defensive as a female author of history schoolbooks. If, as Willard deeply believed, men and women were of equal intellectual and educational potential, if not of social position or responsibility, then she could engage him over such scholastic minutiae. This strategy, however, risked losing the interest or sympathy of an audience unlikely to judge the accuracy of such technical facts. And if, as she also deeply believed, the “weaker sex” did operate at significant disadvantages in public confrontations with men, she risked appearing to be a desperate and emotional woman using her sex as a shield against detailed allegations of shoddy work. Either way, she must have immediately recognized the larger blow to her credibility. As we shall see, however, the unpredictable dynamic of an unfolding public pamphlet war would shape the nature and effectiveness of both authors’ approach to the controversy and complicates our understanding of what really occurred between them.

At the very least, Willard and Barnes needed a new sales strategy: they would have to compete with other schoolbooks instead of just promote their own product. Ads for Willard's histories began to detail their originality and particularly stressed accuracy, impartiality on political and sectional issues, as well as the mistakes and falsifications of Willson's report.Footnote ⁵⁶ The previous debate between Willson and Willard now resumed against a backdrop of more intense competition between them under dynamic market conditions.

Willard's response came in an Appeal Against Wrong and Injury published in April 1847, to which Willson offered a Reply at the end of May, followed by her final Answer to Willson's Reply in August.Footnote ⁵⁷ If Willson really thought that Willard—a prominent female historian with a reputation to protect, a vocal public advocate for female education, and a woman who had publicly challenged and divorced an abusive husband—would meekly submit or remain silent to published criticism by a male competitor, her replies quickly disabused him of any such assumptions. Her pamphlets unlimbered the literary heavy artillery of an accomplished advocate and veteran scholar, suffusing her counterattack with tones of outraged virtue, scholarly condescension, and unrelenting sarcasm. Foremost among her charges was that Willson was immoral, a pirate who manipulated a scholarly society into screening his attack upon a female competitor while he plagiarized her works and stole her hard-earned audience. The conflict of interest between Willson the “reviewer” and Willson the author of a rival text was Exhibit A in a case from which she never wavered. In her mind, this was a conflict between virtue and self-interest.Footnote ⁵⁸

Disdaining any intent to write “for the mere purpose of getting money,” Willard touted her books as a public service, not a business, and thundered:

And for the first time in the debate, Willard openly challenged her accusers as male conspirators trying to undermine a woman's honest and thoroughly professional work. She reminded readers that she was a member “of the weaker sex” who, with “but few means of benefiting themselves or others, compared with males,” now demanded that “when men go so far as to confederate against a woman,” they should do so with higher motives than “avarice, and weapons other than defamation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This conspiracy rendered Willson “unfit … to give moral impressions to the young,” a “greedy adventurer, backed by his publisher” who sought to steal her scholarship “and then slander me for my reward.”Footnote ⁶¹ These accusations reflected the pent-up fury of an author burned by American compilers and British plagiarists who were copying her maps and ideas in geography education without giving her credit.Footnote ⁶² Willson's immorality marked him as an intruder among the genteel guardians of America's providential story for the young.

Perhaps even more important was the fact that Willson's attack offered a golden opportunity to issue a spirited defense of history by, for, and about, women. As a female historian, she was the tip of the spear; as historian Nina Baym concludes, women history writers believed they were “at work for women, for the nation, for God. To write and publish history, from their own point of view, put them in the historical vanguard.”Footnote ⁶³ In that light, we can understand why Willson's focus on Willard in particular, and on what later observers have regarded as trivia,Footnote ⁶⁴ prompted such a fierce response, for if unanswered, the attack might intimidate women from following her example. Willson's criticism might also, of course, undermine her market share and siphon off customers who now concluded that a school history written by a woman was unreliable. We have no direct evidence of Willson's calculations in this episode and must remember that Willard was already competing successfully with perhaps a dozen male authors. One more rival might make a difference if he landed blows against the accuracy of her work. But the market itself was already changing, as women continued to enter the teaching profession, where they communicated with publishers’ agents and influenced textbook adoptions. No one could predict how readers of the pamphlets or this new, larger market of textbook consumers would react. If Willson was aware of the growing influence of women in the teaching profession, was this attack upon Willard's credibility likely to succeed or backfire? Willard dealt with that question through her rallying cry that any member of the “weaker sex” ought to doubt charges of inaccuracy hurled by men who abuse customary positions of authority by plagiarizing women's work. Would Willard then follow up this preliminary foray onto the contested grounds of gender to strengthen the case for women as producers and consumers of history?

In any case, what could be the remedy? His book was out, and it was selling. Was he now to withdraw fourteen thousand copies from the market and then write a different book? Or was he to credit her in future editions even if, as she had charged, they already were poor counterfeits? The only way to sustain a legal claim of piracy was to demonstrate that significant elements of his works were direct copies of hers. Without specifically threatening litigation, she floated a potential case on two central points: his uncredited use of “progressive maps” that were very much like hers, and his copying of her “style” or “plan,” which in those days referred to the arrangement, composition, language, and structure of her books. Willard's counterattack was a fight over originality and the crediting of sources in a profession known for rampant copying without attribution. The ensuing debate revealed the dilemma facing compilers in an age of emerging markets with more segmented audiences, changing educational theory, and a diversifying base of sources for writing history for the public.Footnote ⁶⁵

Their quarrel about style soon moved beyond the specific “parallelisms” she had first enumerated of sentences, phrases, and terms found in both authors’ books, the frequent copying of which, she said, entered “the regions of abuse.”Footnote ⁶⁶ These were mostly common usages, Willson replied, that could be traced to sources both authors had used. The writings of authorities close to the events they chronicled had, in effect, become a collective heritage, a kind of primary source, Willson claimed, “handed down through so many writers, that they may be considered as actually stereotyped in American history,” available for anyone to use:Footnote ⁶⁷

This assertion, which later scholars have mocked as an admission of guilt and an amateurish grasp of historical method,Footnote ⁶⁹ mirrored the complicated relationship between the state of historical literature and the circumstances surrounding schoolbook writing in the middle of the nineteenth century—and it may help explain why none of the others Willson targeted replied to him.

Willard's rejoinder to Willson's argument that everyone copies from the same sources was to separate herself from the pack and, in a remarkable passage, to reveal the process of composition and selection by a history text author. Her seminal Republic of America (1828) had been compiled in the usual way—by female assistants under her editorial supervision using the “standard authors of American history” she listed in the book.Footnote ⁷⁰ Its coverage of the recent past (“worthy to hold a place in the catalogue of our country's literature”) was “original history, made out from public documents, from memoirs of individuals,” some of whom she spoke with and who endorsed and authenticated her work, “and from the knowledge acquired by the author in living through those spirit-stirring times.”Footnote ⁷¹ In light of the appearance of the first volume of Bancroft's master history in 1834, Willard's history and its abridgment, she now told Willson, had been entirely rewritten in editions that lacked references to authorities. The new versions’ distinctive style could be neither mistaken for that of her sources nor confused with anyone else's. Novices like Willson might believe that “all history is made by collections of small plagiarisms, and all of course much alike,” she stated, but the true historian composes with “a style of his own. Although he may derive his materials from others, yet he melts them down, as it were, in the furnace of his own mind, and throws out his sentences from his own peculiar internal moulds.”Footnote ⁷² Bancroft's writing was “ample and discursive,—dealing in splendid circumlocutions,” making him

This “condensed” style was “simple, brief, and direct”; anyone adopting it was, in her view, plagiarizing it. Her problem was that she, too, was a compiler who copied from her sources without attribution, a point reinforced by her criticism of Willson's pedantic citing of books that practically no one without access to “Harvard's library” would be able to check.Footnote ⁷⁴ Why cite authorities that so few Americans could consult, she asked, except as “a trick a man plays upon the public to get himself a reputation for learning”?Footnote ⁷⁵ But in the absence of citations to the experts upon whom she had relied for “facts,” how was a reader to distinguish her voice from theirs in her books, “original history” from her compilation, all without corresponding knowledge of the “ample and discursive style” of her sources?

The other leg of Willard's case concerned Willson's use of “maps changing with the face of the country,” which pirated a “method of illustration” she had pioneered in her school history.Footnote ⁷⁶ Willson's maps mimicked her “plan to make geography subservient to history” and were so badly done that they “discredited” the originals, she argued.Footnote ⁷⁷ But it was questionable whether a poor copy was a copy, and while Willard's abridged history contained over a dozen such maps, Willson opted for only three of his own without crediting her, plus dozens of smaller maps scattered through the work to illustrate events in the text. Willard criticized these as anachronistic, unnecessary, and poorly drawn, but they were not copies of hers and suggested a different strategy: to rely more on numerous small maps to illustrate discrete events as opposed to synoptic maps that traced the country's sweeping spatial expansion.Footnote ⁷⁸

Ultimately, Willard rested her map argument on asserting ownership of an idea—“progressive” maps in textbooks about any subject—that she had introduced into school histories. For this, she believed she deserved credit and more, for, as she noted, “the laborer is worthy of his hire.”Footnote ⁷⁹ She never articulated the consequences of this claim, that is, whether she owned the rights to derivatives, improvements, or applications of this idea in any other work but her own, a claim of moral right or creative interest in the work unrecognized in American copyright law until 1988.Footnote ⁸⁰ But Willard always believed that her innovations in education had marked turning points in the evolution of pedagogy.Footnote ⁸¹ Willson argued that his were original “charts” different from her “maps,” that she could not claim ownership of an idea and thereby prevent others from developing and improving it, and that his comprehensive chart of American history was a unique and creative effort to combine perspective, chronology, and place in one illustration.Footnote ⁸² As her case unfolded in public, it became clear that it could not succeed under current copyright law. And the more she protested, the more Willson hyped the “superior accuracy” of his work over hers. All she had left was outrage.

Willard and Willson were grappling with the compiler's dilemma: in an age that lacked a corpus of original research and a system of professionally operated archives, the materials at hand for writing “compends” of American history comprised flawed accounts by dilettantes and amateurs, partisan memoirs, and scattered fragments of data.Footnote ⁸³ At the time of the debate, only Bancroft's grand narrative of American history up through the late colonial period and Holmes's annalistic chronology provided anything approaching an authoritative framework of the subject.Footnote ⁸⁴ As historian Barry Joyce has pointed out, history education was still heritage education, the transfer of a cultural heritage through a literature where legend shaped method.Footnote ⁸⁵

“Compiling” for the school market was becoming a euphemism for “synthesizing” the works of others, which Willson regarded as a distinct intellectual activity: the creation of a derivative work that improved upon prior works through a new organization, plan, information, and style, which was consistent with literary tradition and early American copyright law.Footnote ⁸⁶ In addition, Willson was describing the work of the compiler of a book for students and not for the advanced specialist. As a compiler, Willson said in 1854, he “laboriously gathered and analyzed the results of the researches of others, and reconstructed them with some degree of unity of plan, and for a good purpose, into these forms of our own,” conducting original research where sources conflict.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was good marketing for Newman to advertise that Willson was “unwilling to take any thing on trust, has pushed his inquiries into every explored and unexplored region; has drawn his facts from original sources, and they may be relied on as correct in the numerous instances in which he differs from his contemporaries.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The debate had thus forced these authors to discuss the fundamentals of writing history for learners: that writing about the past—any past—always meant writing from sources, deciding what sources to use, which ones to trust, and how to interpret those sources to audiences in a way that could be trusted.

In all of this smoke and fury over how to write and source a history textbook, by the end of the exchange any initial assumptions by both authors about the connection between gender and scholarship were challenged and eventually set aside. As noted earlier, there is no manuscript evidence of the authors’ motives, calculations, or conclusions about this episode; indeed, given the fiery language and general circumstances of the confrontation, this absence is striking (especially in Willard's surviving correspondence and diaries, which are almost totally silent on it). Willard raised the stakes in her Appeal by pointing out woman's disadvantaged position relative to men in earning a livelihood. But after Willson replied that an “authoress's” claim to be an “injured woman” should not shield her from just criticism in a literary dispute and the press upbraided both for unseemly behavior, this theme faded from view.Footnote ⁸⁹ Having landed their blows, the debaters moved on. Neither said that gender determined or even influenced one's fitness to write history for children, nor did their publishers take up the matter in the many ads they bought to defend their clients. Willard's most persistent argument rested not only upon Willson's lack of scholarly credentials, his clear conflict of interest, and what she claimed was his piracy of her work, it also called upon her earned rank as a scholar and educator, backed by the accolades of the famous statesmen and historians she knew and cited, and endorsed by thousands of educational administrators and teachers who had purchased and were using her books. This finding is consistent with recent literature attesting to the relatively greater influence of social and economic status over gender in antebellum public—especially educational and intellectual—discourse.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Willard–Willson debate trailed off in late 1847, with no clear resolution or noticeable effect on the sales of their books or the status of their reputations.Footnote ⁹¹ The authors’ careers continued to diverge. Until her death in 1870, Willard's works, especially the revised edition of her Universal History, continued her emphasis on civic virtue, women's influence on events, and Christian piety with a force and impact that none of her textbook competitors could match.Footnote ⁹² Responding to the unfolding sectional drama in revisions and supplements to her texts after the Mexican War, she joined the antebellum chorus of pleas for sectional compromise.

Willson rode the wave of common school reform that Willard had helped to start, but in a very different direction. After an interlude as principal of his alma mater, Canandaigua Academy, from 1849 to 1853, he left teaching for a lucrative career as an entrepreneur in the market for school supplies and teachers, and as a controversial best-selling author of school texts on reading, pedagogy, geography, drawing, and math, which he penned at his country estate in Vineland, New Jersey, until his death in 1905 at age 92.Footnote ⁹³

Willard's and Willson's schoolbooks were parts of a genre of popular writing that was filiopietistic, nationalist, and didactic. These books used common tropes, literary devices, symbols, and illustrations that were consistent with both reigning theories of childhood education and the conditions facing any compiler who created derivative works from a narrow range of available secondary sources. But these similarities tend to obscure significant substantive differences of method and philosophy that the “war of histories” had revealed. Both Willard and Willson introduced distinctive elements into their works. We have already noted women's history and “progressive maps” in Willard's case. Significantly, Willson caught the breezes of new academic theories of racial determinism, object teaching, empiricism, and historicist thinking that were emerging from the great universities of Prussia, England, and France.Footnote ⁹⁴ His American History (1846), inserted a section on the “philosophy of history”—a phrase never uttered in Willard's histories—as a preview of his forthcoming universal history, which relegated the old school belief in history as “philosophy teaching by example” to a place in elementary instruction while reserving the dissemination of useful knowledge to the “advanced student.Footnote ⁹⁵” Willson's more speculative approach departed significantly from Willard and the other seven authors. It rejected a “mere narrative of ancient dynasties and wars, which should throw no light upon the character and circumstances of the people, would furnish no valuable information to reward the student's toil,” in favor of a story where the

Willson was moving beyond his earlier assertion that history “deals mainly with events.” His later work also departed from late Enlightenment ideas, expressed in early geographies and chronographers like Willard's, that chronology framed the past in accordance with the design of Nature's God and that describing the course of events was the business of the historian.Footnote ⁹⁷ His universal history text, Outlines of History (1854), applied this conclusion to the interpretation of Western civilization and marked his greatest divergence from Willard. Drawing upon dozens of sources and amply footnoted, it ignored the position of women in history beyond their serving, with children, as helpless victims of an unbroken stream of rapine and pillage that defined the “barbarism” of ancient and medieval life. But its 244-page addendum, the Philosophy of History for college students and home use, expanded on the themes outlined in his American History and provided an intellectual and cultural history of Western civilization to illustrate principles of progress, democracy, religion, and virtue as the overarching themes of the past. Willson's Outlines was the final history he would write for a school audience, but he continued to expound on the theory of history in promotional newsletters he issued through his publishers late in the decade.Footnote ⁹⁸ “History is a science,” Willson observed in 1858, that “requires us to regard both the motive powers of History—the diverse principles which underlie human conduct on the one hand, and some great end and object of History on the other.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Fidelity to authoritative accounts, he continued, enabled the compiler to synthesize the work of technical specialists into an accessible history where Willson's hazy Hegelianism could displace the stories of great men with “the moving powers of national life—the principles that underlie all history … something inherent in the race, and which lives after individual motives, and acts, and their consequences, are forgotten.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Race and geography shaped civilization and stimulated “the self-impelling spirit of Progress,… [that] has given energy to British character, and spread Anglo-Saxon institutions over the Western and Southern hemispheres; and it promises to subjugate the world to the sway of the industries of civilized life.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Such un-Willardian observations sublimated individual heroics to the unseen forces of environment and race. Together they constituted a crude blend of new and old determinist and racialist ideas culled from Willson's unsystematic reading and were offered gingerly to the public in the heat of the debate in intellectual circles over the racial origins of humankind.Footnote ¹⁰² But they also reflected the secular trend in his and the larger intellectual environment and especially his growing interest in the natural sciences, which became the theme of his next, most profitable, and controversial enterprise, Harper's School and Family Series of Readers.Footnote ¹⁰³

Willson bowed to the market and gave lip service to the hand of providence in American exceptionalism that had structured Willard's histories, while he overlaid a sweeping metahistorical “philosophy of history” across the standard narrative, treating history education as a scientific enterprise of both student inquiry and comprehension of overarching principles of progress, democracy, and enlightenment in the social and cultural history of civilization. Presented not as a research methodology but as an aid to learning for the nonspecialist reader, Willson's first stab at a “philosophy of history” tried to connect grand ideas to events, less sophisticated but in some ways prefiguring the later works of popular historians like Arnold Toynbee and Will Durant.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Ultimately, Emma Willard and Marcius Willson represented branches of a common school movement that was more diverse and unsettled than some scholarly accounts portray.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although they both operated within their time's ideological mainstream and sought the preservation of a national cultural heritage, their debate revealed significant differences in emphasis and purposes in history education. Willard's books and her promotion of female education were a product of the early republic's postrevolutionary project of nurturing civic virtue and stable institutions. Willson, on the other hand, was a man of markets, an independent author unconnected with any institution but his publishers, seeking to bridge the worlds of scholarship and mass readership, an autodidact dedicated to what he later called his core “educational principles” of spreading “useful knowledge to the masses.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Profit was patriotic; his works offered the usual pieties about the virtues of republicanism and Christianity, but with a softer sectarian edge attentive to the increasingly diverse student population in the nation's schools, mirroring the growing secularization of education and the sciences in educational discourse by mid-century. As a businessman and fierce competitor, he tested and improved upon his rivals’ products, serving as mediator between the specialist and the general reader, leaving it to a discerning consumer to establish its worth.

Willard wrote history to save the republic; Willson wrote history to help students discover it. Such objectives, the authors believed, could be the foundation of a livelihood earned through publication of school histories in a mass market that exerted significant pressures on writers of history. The two authors’ professional lives intersected through the compiler's dilemma, as they struggled with squaring the mechanical task of creating derivative works with the intellectual demands of blending knowledge, sourcing, marketing, and audience. We remember Willard for her indefatigable promotion of new pedagogies and female education. We tend to remember Willson, if at all, for the dodgy tactics he used to launch his career at the expense of a famous author and reformer, but we also do well to notice whence that ambition came, what it produced, and where it led.