For educational historians involved in the representation of Indigenous contexts and peoples, what is the relevance of ethnohistory as a discipline or methodology, and what is lost or gained in using it? This article reviews ethnohistorical literature, and brings it in conversation with literature by Indigenous scholars on research methodologies,…

This article brings together six talented women historians in twentieth-century England whose scholarly productions helped shape modern historical practice but who are little known in the canonical accounts of history-writing in the period. The author is looking to map and describe historical communities from a grounded and qualitative perspective…

What was the impact of government grants on the emerging national elementary school systems of the nineteenth century? This article deals with this question through a study of the introduction of matching government grants in Sweden during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that, although the government grants increased…

Historians have often recognised important links between the processes of university and civil service reform in mid-nineteenth-century England. Yet such connections are usually seen as forming part of a wider project of modernising reform with any conservative or counter-revolutionary aims largely discounted. However, as this article suggests,…

Broadening horizons beyond nations, transnational histories trace global flows connecting people and places. Historians have studied the New Education Fellowship (NEF) as a global network. Focused within the nation, research on New Zealand's involvement with NEF has emphasised how its activities before the Second World War impacted on the Labour…

This conjectural essay was originally written for a symposium "Historiography of the future: Looking back to the future" held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33, July 2011, San Luis Potosi, Mexico organised by Kate Rousmaniere and Frank Simon. Participants were asked to envision future challenges for the…

This exploratory paper was prepared for a symposium held at the 2011 ISCHE conference in which participants were asked to envision future challenges in the historiography of education, to predict where the field was moving, and to imagine what innovations and new interests would arise in the subsequent 30 years. While the paper is playfully…

A common history curriculum was introduced for the first time in Northern Ireland schools in 1991, which attempted to bridge the longstanding gap between Catholic and state schools in this field. This paper outlines the various aspects of the crucial role played by a number of historians from all the major universities in Ireland, North and South,…

Historians have long presented France's "civilizing mission" within its colonies in secular terms ignoring women's presence as both actors and subjects. This is particularly true in Algeria where the colonial government's explicitly prohibited proselytism. This article emphasizes women's roles pursuing both secular and religious goals in Algeria.…

Recent work on the history of education has been registering a "spatial turn" in its historiography. These reflections from a historical geographer working on the spatiality of knowledge enterprises (science in particular) reviews some recent developments in the field before turning to three themes--landscape agency, geographies of textuality, and…

For close to 170 years the general consensus from historians has been that Edmund Rice, who founded the Irish Christian Brothers in 1802, was an unenthusiastic applicant to the National Board of Education in Ireland in 1832 and later withdrew his schools because he believed his education was incompatible with the philosophy underpinning the…

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article…

Jesuit education provided the first rigorous educational "system" in the Western world from the 1540s onwards. By 1773 more than 700 Jesuit colleges and universities educating some 250,000 students worldwide constituted the largest educational network in existence up to that time. At the present day, in 68 countries worldwide, the Society of Jesus…

This article is posthumously published as the late Joan Simon's most recent contribution to ongoing debates in historiography of education. Joan remained an active writer and a contributor to this journal and submitted the present article only months before her death, with characteristic determination to engage in historiographical debate, and to…

The authors' research is concerned with the use of visual imagery as data to examine schools and schooling. In attempting to develop knowledge further by incorporating the visual in educational research, they draw on a hybrid mix of disciplines including sociology, ethnography, history and the humanities. Many scholars and historians writing about…