The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Historical Event: An Analysis of U.S. History Textbooks

Data Collection

Unlike in many other nations around the world, there are no centralized, mandated K-12 textbooks in the United States. Instead, publishing companies vie for their textbooks to be adopted at the state or district level, and a handful of publishing companies dominate the market. According to the most recent data available, five U.S. publishers (Wiley, McGraw Hill, Scholastic, Cengage, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and three publishers from the United Kingdom (Pearson, Taylor & Francis, and MacMillan Learning) account for the lion’s share of K-12 and post-secondary textbooks used in the United States (Curcic, 2023; Talbot, 2023), as determined by gross sales in 2021. Other smaller publishing companies also compete in this market; however, finding accurate sales data for such publishers is difficult, as is data on which states or districts have adopted specific textbooks. As such, trying to identify every U.S. History textbook being used in K-12 education in the United States would likely be impossible.

Given that reality, I chose to limit my search to the aforementioned leading educational textbook publishers that dominate the U.S. market. I also chose to focus on U.S. History textbooks written for secondary students given that they would likely provide more depth about the pandemic than textbooks for elementary or middle school students. Finally, to ensure that the textbooks captured the entirety of the pandemic, I limited my search to textbooks with either a 2023 or 2024 publication date.

With those criteria in mind, I went to the websites for each of the eight publishing companies listed above and searched their catalog for U.S. History textbooks. All books published by Scholastic were immediately disqualified since that publisher focuses almost exclusively on resources for younger learners. Wiley and Taylor & Francis had several books pertaining to aspects of U.S. History in their catalog; however, none were textbooks that would be used in a survey of U.S. History at either the K-12 or undergraduate level. Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt both had survey textbooks pertaining to U.S. History; however, the most recent publication date of those books was 2021 and 2022, respectively.2

McGraw Hill, MacMillan Learning, and Cengage, however, did have textbooks that met my criteria, and I analyzed all the textbooks that qualified. Those textbooks were United States History, published by McGraw Hill (Berry et al., 2023); The American Promise: A History of the United States, published by MacMillan Learning (Roark et al., 2023); A People & A Nation: A History of the United States, published by Cengage (Kamensky et al., 2023); and The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, also published by Cengage (Boyer et al., 2024). Of those, United States History was the only one written specifically for a K-12 audience; the others were written with college undergraduates and advanced high school classes in mind, as evidenced by the preface for The Enduring Vision, which stated that it was “designed for both college classrooms and Advanced Placement courses in U.S. history” (Boyer et al., 2024, p. xxi).

Data Analysis

Data analysis followed procedures established in prior reviews of history textbooks (e.g., Brown & Brown, 2010; Lewis & Crowley, 2024). Each of the textbooks dedicated an entire section to the pandemic that ranged from two pages in The Enduring Vision and The American Promise, to three pages in A People & A Nation, and four pages in United States History. I engaged in a line-by-line open coding process of these sections in which I used a constant comparative approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015).

I started the coding process by reading the sections on COVID-19 in each textbook, noting the headings and any supporting materials (e.g., charts and pictures) accompanying the main text. Only United States History and The American Promise included any supporting materials. The former included a graph showing how drastically cases of COVID-19 in the United States grew from January 2020 to May 2021 and a picture of a woman wearing a mask grocery shopping. The American Promise included a graph showing changes in mobility patterns during the pandemic (i.e., more people spent time outdoors at parks instead of indoors at workplaces, grocery stores, and shopping malls).

Then, I took a first pass through the main text, reading line-by-line and typing broad topics/categories into a Word document for each textbook. The following codes initially emerged from the data: COVID-19 origins (e.g., first reported cases), health ramifications, economic ramifications (e.g., businesses forced to close), social ramifications (e.g., social distancing), and political ramifications (e.g., protests against mask wearing). In a second pass through the main text, I provided more detail from each textbook about each of the main topics and entered it into the Word document. For example, the initial code of “health ramifications” included both general information about how COVID-19 made people sick and broader social health ramifications, such as how the pandemic affected people’s mental health and disparities in health outcomes among different groups in society. This second pass through the data resulted in the following subcodes: “mental health (e.g., increased alcoholism),” “health disparities (e.g., higher mortality among historically marginalized communities),” and “Trump’s influence (e.g., flouting CDC guidelines).” Then, I took a third pass through the data and transcribed verbatim quotations related to each code/subcode into the Word document.

After coding the corpus of data, I then looked across the data to see if I could detect patterns across the textbooks. The similarities and discrepancies among the four textbooks began to paint a picture of the official knowledge of the pandemic. I was able to determine that some of the textbooks provided more detail about certain aspects of the pandemic than others; for example, United States History provided considerably more information about the actual coronavirus than any of the other textbooks. Data that were common among all four textbooks suggests common opinions that have formed, whereas the discrepancies suggest areas in which the political process of determining official knowledge is still playing out (Apple, 2014).

Finally, I went through the data based on my own knowledge of the pandemic, having lived through it. In this stage of analysis, I looked as much at what the textbooks omitted as what they said, or what Eisner (1979) famously termed the “null curriculum.” For example, it was immediately apparent that none of the textbooks addressed the controversy surrounding the origins of the virus. Widespread omissions about the pandemic also are part of the process of developing official knowledge of the pandemic as silence should not be construed as neutrality (Apple, 2014).

Positionality

I came to this study as a White male who has vivid memories of life during the pandemic. As was the case for many Americans, the death associated with COVID-19 hit close to home; a member of my wife’s extended family succumbed to the disease during the height of the pandemic. As a white-collar professional, I enjoyed the privilege of being able to work largely from home, but my wife, who is a veterinarian, did not. However, like millions of parents across the United States, I bore the responsibility of balancing work with proctoring virtual schooling for my then-first grade daughter, and I still remember the uncertainty of not knowing when life would return to “normal.” While there was no way to divorce those experiences from my analysis, I do not view them as limitations; on the contrary, my experiences living through the pandemic allowed me to identify places where the textbooks may have omitted key details about the social ramifications of the pandemic.

Beginning of the Pandemic

Not surprisingly, all four textbooks noted that COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, although United States History also stated that “European researchers found evidence of COVID-19 in France and Italy a month before the first cases were identified” (Berry et al., 2023, p. 846). Both The Enduring Vision and United States History noted that President Trump banned travel from China to prevent the virus from entering the United States, but to no avail. Three of the textbooks, United States History, The American Promise, and A People & A Nation, documented the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, although it is worth noting that the latter erroneously stated that the declaration occurred on “March 11, 2022” in an apparent typo (Kamensky et al., 2023, p. 1039). Both The American Promise and United States History then noted the declaration of a national emergency by Trump two days later.

In three of the textbooks, The American Promise, A People & A Nation, and The Enduring Vision, knowledge of the COVID-19 virus was taken as a given, with no explanation provided about how it spread, what the symptoms were, and why it caused so much panic. United States History, on the other hand, provided background knowledge about coronaviruses, briefly describing the emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012 and noting that “scientists began to worry that if a coronavirus similar to but more contagious than SARS or MERS emerged, it could lead to a very dangerous pandemic” (p. 845). The authors continued by stating that

COVID-19 was very contagious. It spread through the tiny droplets of water people exhale when they breathe, cough, sneeze, or talk. Most people who caught COVID-19 experienced mild flu-like symptoms, including cough, fever, fatigue, and difficulty breathing. For a small number of people, the disease could be fatal. It was especially dangerous to older people over 65 and those who had other medical conditions. Although they had limited data, researchers estimated COVID-19’s mortality rate … was about one percent. This was much lower than SARS or MERS, but still 10 to 20 times more deadly than the flu. If everyone in the world had caught COVID-19, there could have been 70 million deaths, which is why health officials worldwide began urgently sounding the alarm (Berry et al., 2023, p. 845).

The authors then noted that since COVID-19 “was more contagious and symptoms did not display quickly” (p. 846), attempts at containing the virus through travel restrictions did not work.

Interestingly, none of the textbooks discussed the possible origins of the virus. Although transmission from animals to humans remains the most plausible theory, a sizeable percentage of the scientific community has questioned that interpretation and has, instead, suggested that COVID-19 most likely originated in a Chinese laboratory (Alwine et al., 2023; Gaviria & Martin, 2023). The textbooks, however, avoided this controversy altogether, which does little to help students think about both the causes of the COVID-19 pandemic and how to prevent future pandemics from occurring.

Social Ramifications

All four textbooks described how the country went into lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. As The American Promise put it, “Almost overnight, Americans’ work lives, social interactions, and travel patterns were completely upended” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 947). The textbooks described various mitigation strategies recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), such as mask wearing and social distancing. As United States History noted, “the [Coronavirus] Task Force recommended Americans not gather in groups greater than ten people and introduced the idea of social distancing. People were asked to stay at home as much as possible and, when out in public, to stay six feet apart from each other” (Berry et al., 2023, p. 846). However, none of the textbooks mentioned that enforcement of these mandates was inconsistent; private businesses were often tasked with enforcing the mandates, and rarely did offenders face legal consequences for not complying (Gee & Gupta, 2020; Lyons & Fowler, 2021).

One of the few mandates that was consistently enforced during the pandemic was the closing of K-12 schools. Each of the textbooks noted that K-12 schools pivoted to virtual learning for the better part of two years and discussed how the pandemic created “enormous strain on working parents with school-age children, who suddenly had to balance jobs with remote learning, and on children themselves” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 948). Yet, none of the textbooks discussed how controversial the decision to close schools was; many students struggled with virtual learning due to lack of technology at home or, in the case of young learners, the lack of adults to offer help, and the sudden closure of schools meant that those students who relied on public schools for warm meals and other basic needs would have to do without (Levinson et al., 2020). Moreover, although United States History gave a brief nod to the learning loss that occurred as a result of virtual learning—only that parents “worried that their children were losing ground in their education, and in their social development” (Berry et al., 2023, p. 848)—the textbooks offered no statements or data on the detrimental effect of the pandemic on student learning, which has been well documented (e.g., Betthauser et al., 2023; Spiteri et al., 2023), or the growing acknowledgment, even among Democrats, that the prolonged closures may have been unwarranted (Dasgupta, 2022; Soriano-Arandes et al., 2023).

Beyond these mitigation procedures, the textbooks were largely silent on other social aspects of the pandemic. Only A People & A Nation described how hospitals struggled with the onslaught of patients and that, particularly in major metropolitan areas, “cities turned to refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of those who succumbed to the virus” (Kamensky et al., 2023, p. 1039). United States History did note that “for the first time since World War II, Americans experienced widespread shortages of basic supplies as people prepared for the crisis and emptied store shelves of food, toilet paper, and other necessities” (Berry et al., 2023, p. 847), and it was the only textbook to touch on the mental health aspect of the pandemic. It noted that the “imposed isolation increased loneliness, depression, alcoholism, and domestic violence” (Berry et al., 2023, pp. 847–848). The textbook also described the emotional toll on families “as the elderly and the terminally ill often died alone as friends and relatives were not allowed to be with them nor could grieving relatives gather at funerals to mourn their loss” (Berry et al., 2023, p. 848).

The textbooks did not address social programs that occurred during the pandemic other than mentioning, broadly, the federal aid that was given to small businesses to keep them afloat. Three of the textbooks (The American Promise, The Enduring Vision, and United States History) noted that this federal aid was necessary (Journell, 2024), but none of the textbooks discussed how much of this money was mismanaged or how it likely contributed to the increased inflation that we have seen in recent years. None of the textbooks mentioned any other types of federal aid given to help Americans (e.g., unemployment assistance and funding to provide meals to students out of schools).

Finally, the textbooks were also largely silent with respect to how the pandemic affected communities of color. The American Promise was the only one to note that, based on age-adjusted data, Latinx, Black Americans, and Native Americans died from COVID-19 at roughly twice the rate of White Americans. The American Promise also was the only textbook to reference the rise in anti-Asian sentiment that occurred during the pandemic (see An & Rodríguez, 2022), which the authors partially attributed to Trump’s oft-repeated description of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 948). None of the textbooks explicitly discussed the pandemic as occurring alongside widespread protests for racial equity. All of the textbooks did address the Black Lives Matter protests that began after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police; however, each of the textbooks placed that information in sections that were separate from their coverage of the pandemic.

Economic Ramifications

The textbooks were most aligned when discussing the economic ramifications of the pandemic. Each of the textbooks acknowledged that the economic effect of the lockdowns was “vastly uneven” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 949). As The American Promise noted,

Better-off Americans, cushioned by savings and often able to work remotely on videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, were better able to weather the pandemic than essential but low-income workers—grocery store clerks, bus and subway drivers, and service staff of all kinds—who had no choice but to work in person and risk exposure to the virus (Roark et al., 2023, p. 949).

The Enduring Vision also noted that the increased unemployment that occurred during the pandemic was not evenly distributed, hitting young people and workers in retail, service, and manufacturing harder and “widening economic inequities between those with a college degree and those without” (Boyer et al., 2024, p. 936).

The textbooks also lauded the sacrifices of front-line health care workers. Both A People & A Nation and United States History described doctors and nurses as working “heroically” (Kamensky et al., 2023, p. 1039), and The American Promise noted that, particularly early in the pandemic, they often worked without sufficient protective gear. In addition to acknowledging the long hours that these medical professionals put in during the height of the pandemic, the textbooks touted their bravery for “[risking] their lives to care for others” (Boyer et al., 2024, p. 936).

Political Ramifications

In a concurrent study on how these textbooks portrayed the Trump era, I found that each of the textbooks gave the Trump administration credit for Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development of a vaccine for COVID-19 in record time, as well as the federal aid given to small businesses that helped mitigate rising unemployment. However, three of the textbooks—A People & A Nation, The American Promise, and The Enduring Vision—were highly critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. They noted that Trump had disbanded the White House pandemic response team in 2018, withdrew U.S. funding from the WHO in the middle of the pandemic, undermined CDC guidance, criticized public health experts, and peddled ineffective and potentially dangerous “cures” for the virus (Journell, 2024).

Beyond the focus on Trump, each of the textbooks also acknowledged how the pandemic exacerbated existing political divides. As A People & A Nation noted, “attempts to preserve public health by requiring masks, regulating restaurants, businesses, and schools, and even promoting vaccination, became politicized” (Kamensky et al., 2023, p. 1039). The American Promise went even further:

Rather than coming together in the face of the biggest public health crisis in a century, Americans at times seemed to turn on one another. Ugly fights broke out between those who supported masking and social distancing and those who scorned health protocols; between teachers who felt unsafe returning to classrooms and parents and lawmakers who wanted children back in school; and between groups that supported vaccine mandates as the only path to containing the virus and those that championed citizens’ freedom to make their own medical decisions, free of government interference (Roark et al., 2023, p. 949).

United States History offered a similar tone, noting that 39 states ultimately instituted mask mandates and stating,

Complicating the policymaking was that the risk from COVID-19 was very low for many people but extremely high for others. This posed a basic civics problem that divided Americans: how to balance the public good against individual rights and how to protect the vulnerable without intruding too much on people’s freedom (Berry et al., 2023, p. 847).

This quotation in United States History was the only time any of the four textbooks even implicitly addressed the ableism present in the political discourse advocating for ending safety measures. None of the textbooks directly noted that COVID-19 disproportionately affected older Americans and people with disabilities and preexisting health conditions. In states and localities in which restrictions were lifted or ignored, people more susceptible to fatal outcomes from COVID-19 were forced to become even more isolated—a fact not addressed in any of the textbooks.

Only The Enduring Vision appeared to place more blame for the divisive political climate on a particular side. While the authors acknowledged that “some liberals complained that government had not done enough to free society from the disease’s grip,” they went on to say that “much louder criticisms came from conservatives, who reframed public health measures, like school closures and mask and vaccination mandates, as infringements upon personal liberty” (Boyer et al., 2024, p. 936). Two of the textbooks, The Enduring Vision and The American Promise, attributed this COVID-19 polarization to Americans’ propensity to consume inaccurate information. As the former noted, “stuck at home during quarantine, Americans sought information from cable news and the Internet, where extreme views and dueling conspiracy theories about the disease proliferated” (Boyer et al., 2024, p. 937). Both textbooks specifically mentioned the disinformation campaigns against the new mRNA vaccines, with The American Promise citing statistics showing that in 2019 three-fourths of Americans believed that the two political parties disagreed “not just on matters of policy or ideology but about what constituted ‘basic facts’” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 949). Yet, neither of the textbooks explicitly blamed either side for these disinformation campaigns despite research showing a clear connection between conservative ideology, particularly among those who voted for Trump, and conspiratorial beliefs about both COVID-19 and the vaccines (e.g., DiMaggio, 2022; Jung & Lee, 2024; Stecula & Pickup, 2021).

Finally, three of the textbooks attempted to disrupt the “American exceptionalism” narrative typically found in U.S. curricula by showing how the United States mishandled the pandemic compared to other developed nations around the world (Journell, 2022). After noting that the U.S. death toll exceeded one million, out of six million deaths worldwide, A People & A Nation bluntly stated that the United States was “ill prepared” for the pandemic and noted that death rates in the United States “exceeded those of other wealthy nations” (Kamensky et al., 2023, pp. 1039–1040). The Enduring Vision stated that the death toll was comparable to the “height of the 1918 influenza pandemic” a century earlier, despite greater medical advancements in place to combat COVID-19 (Boyer et al., 2024, p. 936). The American Promise chastised the nation for ranking 67^th in the world in 2022 in terms of the proportion of the population that had been fully vaccinated, despite “its wealth and easy access to doses of the vaccine” (Roark et al., 2023, p. 949).

Limitations

A study of four textbooks cannot claim to be representative of how all textbooks cover the COVID-19 pandemic. It is certainly possible that textbooks published by smaller publishing houses that were not included in this study could have framed the pandemic differently. Moreover, it is also possible that, similar to what Stoddard et al. (2011) found in their follow-up study on the representation of 9/11 in textbooks, subsequent editions of the textbooks included in this study will change their narrative about the pandemic. Future studies should replicate this analysis with both subsequent editions of these four textbooks, as well as textbooks from other publishing companies, to see how the official knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic changes over time.

Finally, although the four textbooks used in this study were published via companies that dominate the U.S. textbook market, there is no guarantee that they will be widely adopted by states or individual school districts. Even if they are adopted for use, it is uncertain their impact on classroom instruction or student learning. Certainly, some teachers may choose to ignore the textbook narratives completely or supplement them with counter-perspectives that challenge the depiction of the pandemic found in the textbook.