One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called "the end of classical…

The launch of "Sputnik" in 1957 sparked a crisis in American education. Suddenly threatened by superior Soviet technology, progressive educators' concern for children's preferences, health, and adjustment in school yielded to public demands for more basic learning and academic skills. Congress soon passed the National Defense Education Act,…

This article presents an analysis of LGBTQ education history with an Ohio narrative to underscore a point: four decades into the publication of LGBTQ history it remains a critical enterprise--essential to a collective understanding of the past, vulnerable to those who do not approve of its subject(s), and undergoing significant change. The Ohio…

Inspired by Manifest Destiny and lured by prospects of economic gain, Eastern entrepreneurs migrated to the Western frontier in the mid nineteenth century. As they pursued wealth through railroads, mining, land speculation, and other endeavors, many succeeded and had their names recorded in the pages of the history of the region; others passed…

When the author first began attending History of Education Society annual meetings as a graduate student in the 1990s, he would often listen wide-eyed to war stories of the good old days when sessions would break down into shouting matches between "radical revisionists" and their opponents. He thinks older generation of historians missed both the…

This article examines the history of Head Start, a federally funded program, whose conceptualization emerged in earlier phases of the Civil Rights Movement in order to provide education, nourishing meals, medical services, and a positive social environment for children about to enter the first grade. While Head Start was implemented in states…

This address derives from the intellectual contributions of young scholars and doctoral students, in faded memory of the author's life as a doctoral student and young scholar. This address has three purposes: (1) to define school desegregation; (2) to place--albeit briefly--that definition within the larger context of the literature on school…

The development of the Child Study Centre (CSC) at University of British Columbia (UBC) provides a unique perspective on the complex and often contradictory relationship between child study and preschool education in postwar Canada. In this article, the authors detail the development and eventual closure of the CSC at UBC, focusing on the uneasy…

This article explores the influence of evolutionary ideas, especially Social Darwinism, on G. Stanley Hall's (1844-1924) educational ideas and major writings on gender and race. Hall formed these progressive ideas as he developed an American Social Darwinist pedagogy, embedded in his efforts to create the discipline of psychology, the science of…

In 1941, members of the local unit of the Florida State Teachers Association (FSTA) met in Tampa to plan a lawsuit against Hillsborough County's school board for paying African-American teachers less than white teachers. Hilda Turner, who taught history and economics at Tampa's historically black high school, agreed to serve as plaintiff; she was…

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…

On the night of November 11, 1817, nineteen-year-old Rufus Choate rushed to Dartmouth Hall from his Hanover boarding room to answer a call of alarm from his classmates. Professors from Dartmouth University, an institution recently created by legislative action, "had violently attacked" the student library under Choate's care "and, after an…

Rather than banking enormous gifts, Harvard University built its wealth by adhering to a coherent strategy that gradually became the common sense--the prevailing ideology--of how to build and maintain the wealth of private universities. President Charles W. Eliot formulated this "free money" strategy over the course of his administration from 1869…

In the early 1970s the first large cohorts of Chicano PhD scholars entered academia, often hired into faculty positions at newly created Chicano departments or centers. The academic identities of the first Chicano PhD scholars were firmly grounded in "Chicanismo," a term which emphasizes ethnic nationalism, political and economic equity, and…

The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of "culture" because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both reason and…