As the author of this article read through the fascinating ruminations of Drs. Albisetti, Finkelstein, Thelin, and Urban, it seemed to him that two basic points emerge, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, Albisetti, Finkelstein, and Urban are asking historians of education to move away from national frames of reference to either a…

The "Partial Agenda for Modern European Educational History" proposed by Albisetti focuses primarily on the nineteenth century, and on some large-scale trends and issues, such as those relating to education and secondary instruction for women. Discussing this issue implies--especially in the diverse and heterogeneous context of…

What topic would you choose if you had the luxury of writing forever? In this article, John Thelin provides his response: He would opt to write about the history of higher education in a way that relies on quantitative data. "Numbers, please!" is his research request in taking on a longitudinal study of colleges and universities over…

Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. The difficulty women had in becoming professors had a…

This article focuses on historical admissions policies and offers a more nuanced and more substantial treatment of the relationship between Populism and higher education. Prior accounts of admissions in the late nineteenth century have sensibly focused upon the tension between secondary school leaders who were mindful of their multiple…

In August 1945, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers. From September 1945 to April 1952, the United States occupied the defeated country. Douglas MacArthur, an American army general and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), attempted to transform Japanese society from an authoritarian regime into a budding democracy.…

In the 1890s, the Board of Trustees of the not-yet-built University of Chicago had just elected Rainey Harper to be its first president, and later, he would formally accept the position. Harper left a secure position at Yale University to accept the presidency of a university that was nothing more than an idea, a board of trustees, and the…

During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley--then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education--made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for…

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S.…

Of the classic documents addressing issues in higher education, few have provoked as much commentary as the Yale Report of 1828--and perhaps fewer still have been subject to such undeserved infamy. Today, the document requires a thorough new reading. Since the late 1960s historians of higher education have been trying to overturn the traditional…

In September 1830 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with some leaders of the Choctaw Nation. The treaty reinforced the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, which paved the way for the large-scale physical removal of tens of thousands of tribal people of the southeast, including many of the Choctaw. It provided…

Recent historiography has documented the singular contributions made by women to racial uplift and progress during the Jim Crow era. In these endeavors, women's contributions were greatly shaped by race, gender, and class. Given the feminization of education in the United States during this time, it is not surprising that their "race work" was for…

At the turn of the century approximately a thousand white Southern women braved the consternation of friends and sometimes family, and traveled hundreds of miles to attend the best Northern women's colleges for an education unavailable to them in the South. For many, the experience was revolutionary: they developed self-confidence, independence,…

The history of public higher education for African Americans in Florida provides an excellent opportunity to examine American institutional and political dynamics. Following World War II, Florida public higher education expanded dramatically, while at the same time, state leaders maintained racial segregation well after "Brown v. Board of…

The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of postsecondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nation's campuses, taking advantage of a little…