This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report's advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven's social and economic stability. The Yale Report's…

This paper uses the writings of European teachers and Chinese students at St. Stephen's Girls' College in Hong Kong--published in English periodicals of its school magazine and local English newspapers--to examine how the school tactically positioned itself as an educational site for the "useful women of China" during a period in…

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for "equal pay for equal work" in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT's success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were…

Alongside Walt Disney's animated movies, television programming, and theme parks, scholars have examined The Walt Disney Studios' "True-Life Adventures" series of live-action nature documentary films for their impact on popular culture. Historians, however, have mostly overlooked the significance of the "True-Life Adventures"…

This article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of "innovation" at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental…

Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has "the public good" been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a "white" good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to…

Cold War strategic priorities led the United States to establish an enduring military alliance with General Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain between 1953 and 1975. This article examines the educational diplomacy carried out by the US government during the 1960s and early 1970s to foster Spain's stable modernization through the training of…

This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation,…

This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of…

This article examines children's literature written by African American teachers during the first part of the twentieth century. Drawing on theories of racialization, I analyze children's books written by two African American teachers: Helen Adele Whiting (1885-1959) and Jane Dabney Shackelford (1895-1979). I argue that their books represented…

This article explores the All-Day Neighborhood Schools (ADNS) program, operated as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and local philanthropists from 1936 to 1971. Designed to expand the resources available to children and parents, the program included after-school activities, additional teachers, professional development,…

In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison…

This article examines the relationship between gender and leadership in southern public Black colleges from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Public colleges offer a unique view of this relationship because, in an era of disfranchisement, the political stakes of leadership were more obvious than in private schools. I argue…

This article argues that the "airlift" language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the…