This article examines cases of governors who established a foundation for school choice between 1980 and 1996. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to alleviate economic concerns and anxieties about desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled…

This essay reflects on my research and teaching on the history of gender and education, specifically with respect to the schooling history of Chinese women in the colonial world. In doing so, it aims to propose an alternate way of seeing the silent and missing figures in the colonial archives: the subordinated, marginalized, feminine colonial…

The historiography of African American education has stressed the work of education professionals, tensions over curricula, and the desegregation of schools. Informal learning settings, while recognized as important educative spaces, have remained tangential to the broader narrative of the struggle for education. Thus, the influence of Black civic…

Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This…

As a field, the history of education contains scant analyses of power, deprivation, or privilege from a white, patriarchal, or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself. This claim reflects that to some degree, gender is racialized and race is gendered. To support this…

This article traces the contours of the history of women's education in England and Ireland in the period 1850-2000, mapping dominant themes and key inflection points. Positing a framework for reading degrees of change over time, we propose four interrelated lenses: access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks. Drawing on key…

This article traces the unique set of factors that allowed mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men. I argue that in the period 1850-1856, a window of opportunity offered a small group of women the chance to pursue medical education at the traditionally all-male regular Cleveland Medical College, at a…

This forum contribution considers the complexities and importance of gender in the historiography of LGBTQ+ college students. After a brief introduction, we focus on four key areas in the existing historiography: women's romantic relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education leaders' enforcement of…

It has long been recognized that legal documents are invaluable for understanding the growth of pre-university teaching across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England; when surveyed as a whole, they allow the general spread of schooling to be mapped with precision. However, smaller, more scattered legal proceedings involving teachers can be no…

This article comparatively examines expertise and policy-making related to school maturity in postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland. Through an analysis of published sources and archival material, it traces the intensive development of pedagogical and psychological expertise about school maturity from the early 1960s onward and examines how that…

From 1493 to 1507, Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada after the Spanish Reconquista, ran a residential school for Morisco noble boys in his palace. This article argues that Talavera's school set the foundation for the long history of residential schooling as a tool to transform or eradicate a conquered culture through the…

Educational pathways in colonial and postcolonial spaces often range far beyond the classroom. Reconstructing histories of this wider terrain of education reveals long-running arguments over what types of new knowledge might be most useful for living well amid war and within fast-changing colonial and postcolonial states. These debates over the…

This paper explores the implementation and enduring significance of the German language program in Milwaukee Public Schools between 1867 and 1918. Despite the German language program facing challenges, notably the Bennett Law of 1889--which sought to restrict foreign language instruction statewide--the program persisted, highlighting the tension…

The article examines the challenges that urban teachers faced in unitary systems, where students of different ages and educational levels shared the same classroom and were taught by a single teacher. It aims to compare these challenges across several cities including Alicante, Badajoz, Cádiz, Canary Islands, Málaga, and Zaragoza to determine…

This paper compares concerted efforts to unify early instructional practice in the US in the early twentieth century and in the twenty-first century. The first effort began with the founding of the National Council for Primary Education in 1915; the second began in 2005 with calls for pre-K-3 alignment. Analysis of relevant sources indicates that…