While US and Dominican officials have traditionally received credit for the expansion of the public school system during the US military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, this article offers an alternative account by focusing on the role of guardians, or caretakers, in supporting and creating schools in this period. Drawing…

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 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…

America's schools are more segregated today than they were three decades ago. After initial progress in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in "Brown v. Board of Education"--further bolstered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as by several other rulings by the court--the nation's schools began a process of resegregation in…

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…

The educational attainment literature has brought back interest in early American primary schools, and much current research views those schools as superior to their European peers in the education offered to youth. Its emphasis, though, on using school enrollment as the prime indicator of attainment conflicts with the revisionist view of a…

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a…

Contrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell's majority opinion in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez" (1973), Texas's school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

By the end of the nineteenth century, social hygiene was a topic of great importance for states experiencing fears of national degeneration. The health of children was of particular concern, as it was thought to reflect the future health of the nation. Although this prompted nation-states like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United…

In the mid to late nineteenth century, many missionary women from Western countries arrived in Japan to engage in educational work. They made a significant impact not only on the establishment of Christian kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training schools but also on the dissemination of Friedrich Froebel's theory of kindergarten education…

The long history of Montessori education in India dates to 1915, and it was expanded through Maria and Mario Montessori's work in India between 1939 to 1946 and 1947 to 1949. The article characterizes a century of Montessori education in India as a series of "adapted, competing, and contested framings" with key disputes over Montessori…

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had…

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified…

Andrew Monroe [pseud.] (b. 1894) was a Colorado street kid whose acts of truancy and theft landed him before the state's early juvenile courts, and his youth was marked by attempts at escape from reform school. His childhood and youth provide insights into the mechanics of how systems of juvenile corrections operated in the early twentieth…