While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned throughout the past 150 years, racial biases concerning such writing have persisted through today. Adapting Mark Phillips' (2013) concept of historical distance coupled with a form of linguistic analysis known as stylistics, I examine 50 U.S. social studies textbooks from 1860 to 2016 chosen by variation sampling and analyze which individuals and groups are discussed as experiencing suffering and whether or not these hardship narratives are apt to elicit compassion from their readers. I find that textbooks published after the U.S. Civil War consistently contain discourses that at first encouraged readers to be primarily concerned with the welfare of white elites and, over time, extended their compassionate writing styles to eventually all white people. At the same time, these texts consistently neglected to acknowledge the hardship experiences of domestic marginalized groups and, when their hardships were discussed, their narrative styles were likely to limit readers' inclination to be concerned about their oppression. Specifically, I find that the most enduring writing characteristic for U.S. textbook authors from the mid-19th century through today was to discuss acts of violence by non-white groups towards white people using the active voice while describing violence by white North Americans (first British and then U.S. nationals) towards non-whites in the passive voice, which previous studies had found differentially impacts readers' capacity not only to recall but also to empathize with such hardship narratives. Identifying how textbook authors may selectively use these stylistic discourses in biased ways has significant implications for understanding and addressing not only history instruction, but for contemporary civil rights struggles as well.