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.…

The educational history of Upper Canada is commonly written as the succession of an elite group of educational reformers who advocated a centralized system of mass schooling. However, the recent shift in research on Upper Canada away from the narrative of prominent individuals who controlled the social, political, and economic development of the…

The world of private fundamentalist education grew prodigiously throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. These schools needed curricular materials and guiding educational philosophies. The impassioned debates among leading fundamentalist educators directly affected the education of hundreds of thousands of students. Concern over the…

Historical scholarship has traditionally focused on the commonalities uniting Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon, the two leading antebellum women's educational reformers in New England. This essay shifts that focus by contrasting their educational philosophies and exploring the implications their differences had for the development of American…

This essay examines the college lives of two generations of Iowa's black college women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the experiences of black women at Iowa's private colleges and the University of Iowa (UI) from 1878 to 1928. The experiences of black women in Iowa's colleges and universities are important for…

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have…

This article features Ruth Wright Hayre, Philadelphia's first black high school teacher and principal whose work at William Penn High School for Girls became a model for counseling and motivation programs at other majority-black high schools in Philadelphia, expanding educational and career opportunities for thousands of "able" students. Through…

This article reexamines texts published during the period of the initial formation of the nation, from 1783 to 1815, or from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. This examination of thirty-one textbooks (sixteen geographies and history texts, and fifteen readers and grammar books), most written by New Englanders but also…

In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded Jean Piaget's psychology as of "outstanding interest" and wrote in "Progressive Education" that it should be of "immense service" to psychologists, teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praised Piaget's research in the National Society for the Study of Education's…

The purpose of this article is to provide a better understanding of the history of fundraising in black college communities; to complicate understandings of white involvement in black college fundraising; to understand the role of fundraising, that is, fundraising for social change and social justice, during the period that followed the "Brown"…

This article discusses the role of education within communities and underscores the changing nature of minority groups in the United States. It specifically examines the struggle between African Americans and Latinos over education, employment, and empowerment in Compton, California. The story of Compton and its school district exposes…

The kindergarten was, in all countries but Germany, a foreign import. The most familiar aspect of its diffusion to American scholars is the spread of Froebel's teachings into England and the United States by emigrants who had left the German Confederation after the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49. Familiar as well are the propaganda efforts…

Research on the history of children and childhood in modern Japan (1868-1945) reveals that issues related to civil society, state, and the establishment of institutions for young children can be explored beyond the transatlantic world. In this essay, after briefly surveying historiography, a few basic terms, and earlier patterns of state and…

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This essay focuses on an analysis of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens. Starting from…

This article examines the work of Lady Nancy Astor (1879-1964) in campaigning for nursery education and nursery schools in Britain from the late 1920s until the Second World War. Arguably no elected politician in England at any time, including the present, has identified themselves more closely with the cause of nursery schooling in Britain.…