Schoolbooks and Elementary Education

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of American children who attended school increased dramatically. School enrollment was highest in New England, followed by the Middle Atlantic, the Midwest, and the South. Primary and common schools taught children how to read and write, and in so doing, helped increase the overall literacy rate in the United States. More children in schools was good news for publishers, who quickly took advantage of the growing market for schoolbooks. Primers, readers, grammars, and spellers were the most popular texts used by young American students, but books on arithmetic, geography, and history were also fairly common.