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 author of this article, James W. Fraser, is Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. He begins this article with an expression of his gratitude to Robert Hampel and the editors of "The History of Education Quarterly" for commissioning the four…

The author wishes to divide this essay into two sections, one indicating things he might have added to a few earlier works, and a second indicating a project or two that he did not complete but would like to have done. First he discusses the incomplete projects. He begins by saying that he has done a lot of work on teacher organizations and has…

As a historian of education, what excites you and compels you to keep doing scholarly work? If mortality were not an issue, how might you find your continued place in the field among ideas and sources that are dauntingly and increasingly vast? What is the work you most want to do? Jackie Blount provides her response herein: She would want to…

"Newsweek" ran an article on "The Homosexual Teacher" in December 1978. At the end of a tumultuous two-year period framed by Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in South Florida and John Briggs' proposition to bar gay and lesbian educators from working in California public schools, reporters concluded, "Most homosexual…

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…

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…

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,…

Professor Tamura, in her paper "Narrative History and Theory," poses an issue with which the author has lately wrestled. She reviews some of the challenges to the tradition of narrative history presented by "social-scientifically oriented historians" like Fernand Braudel and "analytic philosophers" like Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s, and…

In this article, the author discusses the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Historians, like everyone else, have little choice regarding the use of theory; to one extent or another they must. The question is how much and to what end. The author aims to consider the…

In this article, the author talks about the proper place of theory in educational history and shares his comments on the essays by Eileen Tamura, Carolyn Eick, and Roland Coloma. Eileen Tamura's positing of most educational historians as practitioners of narrative history is surely on the mark. She invites historians of education to investigate…

The three essays that make up this issue on theory in educational history by Eileen Tamura, Caroline Eick, and Roland Sintos Coloma constitute an indictment of the field of the history of education for its neglect of theory. Read linearly, from the Introduction through Coloma, the indictment becomes increasingly strident, moving from a gentle call…

The three articles that make up this issue on theory in educational history are a welcome engagement with the challenges raised by poststructuralism and other theoretical developments. They contribute to what should be an ongoing conversation about the nature of the enterprise of writing the history of education. The three articles in the special…

This author describes herself as someone who has questioned the role of theory since she first began studying educational history several decades ago, and who has attempted to use theory. She sees contradictions in what she is researching and how she is doing it, contradictions that arise from her graduate training, the developments in…

Historians need social theories to conduct their research whether they are acknowledged or not. Positivist social theories underpinned the professionalization of the writing of history as well as the establishment of the social sciences as "disciplines," in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. August Comte's "science of society" and…