America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the…

After World War II, the colonial rule imposed by the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan was symbiotically connected with its project of nation building. This project of "national colonialism" initially spurred the KMT to build an extensive public education system and to marginalize private schools. Financial concerns after 1954, however, forced…

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and…

Historical analyses of 1960s university campus activism have focused on activities related to the civil rights movement, Free Speech Movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This study supplements the historiography of civil disobedience and political activity on college campuses during that tumultuous era with an account of the initiation of…

In nineteenth-century America, students buried their mathematics books. This practice consistently celebrated the milestone of passing through collegiate mathematics, yet it changed due to national events. This article considers the case of Bowdoin College, where students buried their books differently before and after the Civil War. Antebellum,…

The following article documents the expansion of high school exchange programs during the Cold War. It also examines the potential conflicts underlying that expansion, which relied on preexisting networks of government agencies and private philanthropies and sometimes conflated the rhetoric of world peace with a narrower pursuit of American…

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…

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,…

Inspired by Manifest Destiny and lured by prospects of economic gain, Eastern entrepreneurs migrated to the Western frontier in the mid nineteenth century. As they pursued wealth through railroads, mining, land speculation, and other endeavors, many succeeded and had their names recorded in the pages of the history of the region; others passed…

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…

Numerous faculty members at the University of Michigan and institutions across the nation found themselves victims of hysteria and anti-German extremism during World War I. Through an examination of restrictions on speech before American entry into the war, investigations into the loyalty of more than a dozen educators, and considerations of the…

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take…

The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of "culture" because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both…

During and after the American Civil War, individual state governments, faced with numerous economic demands, struggled to meet the needs of soldiers and their families. Among other pressing questions, they had to decide what to do with the massive number of dependent children orphaned by the war. In order to protect children, it became more…

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.…