By his own admission, Kenneth Anthony is not a historian, so when he was chosen to update the Mississippi history textbook the state’s junior high and high school students are using this year, it may have seemed an odd choice.
“I’ve never claimed to be a historian,” said Anthony, 53. “I see myself as a teacher.”
Anthony is the head of Mississippi State University’s Department of Education and Leadership, a background he said was particularly helpful as he accepted the challenge of updating the state’s Mississippi history textbook.
“I have the heart of a teacher, and I think that was helpful as I worked on the project,” Anthony said. “With textbooks, you are writing for a classroom, and a teacher’s perspective is important. You’re writing for a standard that is not necessarily the same as writing for the general public. It’s a distilling of all the stuff to determine what is the critical information we want students to know about the past.”
Of course, Anthony is not without his history credentials. The Tupelo native earned his bachelor’s degree in history before pursuing a career in education. He also earned a master’s degree at the U.S. Naval War College, which seems an odd diversion from his educational path that also includes a master’s degree in gifted education and a doctoral degree in secondary education.
“How that happened goes back to after I graduated from high school,” Anthony said. “I had seven siblings and I was seventh in GPA, so I wasn’t going to college on scholarships. So the question became, ‘how was I going to go to college?’”
Anthony joined the Army Reserve to fund his education, then joined the Army National Guard in 1988. That allowed him to apply for War College.
“It was fantastic,” Anthony said. “I learned a lot of political science and history while I was there.”
Two years ago, Claremont Press decided it was time to revise and update its current Mississippi History textbook, David Sansing’s 2013 textbook, “A Place Called Mississippi.”
“I had a colleague that had worked with Claremont Press who suggested me for the project,” Anthony said.
Anthony said history textbooks need to be revised periodically as new information on history events and people emerge.
“Our understanding of events changes,” Anthony said. “This revision was guided by what I learned from research I conducted about reconstruction narratives in older Mississippi history textbooks.”
Anthony’s book research included visiting historical sites and museums across the state. He incorporated more primary sources directly into the text, drawing from Census data, maps from the Library of Congress and accounts compiled by Bradley Bond in “Mississippi: A Documentary History.” After devoting five to 10 hours each week to the book, the result was “Mississippi: Our History, Our Home.”
Some of the “new” history in the textbook includes the state flag adopted in 2021 and the state song “One Mississippi” adopted in 2022. The revision shines new light on Emmett Till’s story, documenting the false accusation that led to his lynching in 1955. It also includes new archaeology information about the earliest inhabited site in the state and expands the Civil War narrative, adding battles and engagements throughout Mississippi.
To bring things full circle, he added Sansing to the chapter of Mississippi writers, noting how Sansing himself broke history.
“He was the historian who wrote the first Mississippi history textbook that broke the dominant 80-year narrative about reconstruction,” Anthony said.
Fittingly, Anthony is listed as co-author of the textbook along with Sansing, who died in 2019.
“It was my honor to add him to the textbook, especially given that I was revising his original work,” Anthony said.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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