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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

There is a widely held notion, even among educational historians, that the history of education is an unusual academic specialty, embraced fully by neither the professional world of teaching nor the historical profession. But in fact, the history of education may not be so unusual a specialization. It is one of a number of historical fields of…

In 1979, fourteen years after publishing his landmark work, "The Emergence of the American University," Laurence R. Veysey wrote a forward-looking article for the "American Quarterly" titled "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered." In his article, Veysey suggested that the time had come to rewrite American…

This conversation begins with two observations: first, the professional organizations--conferences and journals--need to play more self-conscious, activist roles in shaping scholarly canons. Second, whatever canon now presides over American higher educational history is an extremely tolerant one. So much of current scholarship seems to arise out…