The rise of online learning over the past few decades has raised fundamental questions about the kinds of "spaces" and "places" this mode of education creates. Do they support meaningful exchanges? Can they advance educational equity, access, and community-building? Are they comparable to in-person classroom experiences? The…

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…

Lurking in the shadows of education history are networks of human interaction, transcultural encounters, forms of global connection, and dispersed sites of cultural teaching and learning that are barely visible in the master narratives of education history. Who would have thought a half-century ago that we would become witnesses and participants…

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…

"The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment," stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare "pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists." This statement reveals some of the…

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…

In this article, the author focuses on the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and educational reform. The Klan's meteoric rise to national prominence in the 1920s has attracted a great deal of attention from historians, yet the group and its popularity during this time frame remain poorly understood. This is due in part to the fact that Klan symbols such…

On May 4, 2006, French and German cultural ministers announced the publication of "Histoire/Geschichte", the world's first secondary school history textbook produced jointly by two countries. Authored by a team of French and German historians and published simultaneously in both languages, the book's release drew considerable public…

Scholarly writing on college sports gets better as the problems of college sports get worse. This does not mean that the authors are causing the problems. Rather, the excesses and ills of college sports, past and present, provide such fertile data that historians of higher education enjoy a perverse embarrassment of research riches. This maxim is…

While narrative history has been the prevailing mode in historical scholarship, its preeminence has not gone unquestioned. In the 1980s, the role of narrative in historical writing was "the subject of extraordinarily intense debate." The historical backdrop of this debate can be traced to the preceding two decades, when four groups of thinkers…

The essential nature of oral historical inquiry "naturally" and "relentlessly" brings an oral historian to theory. In this essay, the author argues for the relevance of theory in oral historical research that explores generational transformations in the relational experiences of youth attending desegregated schools in the…

This article explores the epistemological innocence of the field of history of education. The author's interrogation of the field's regime of truth and its effects intends to enact what he is conceptualizing as a "self-reflexive historiography," a historiography that attends to the ways in which the field has constituted and turned historians of…

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…