As colleges and universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, many in the media call it "unprecedented." This is not the first time that institutions of higher education have had to respond to an epidemic, however. A historical review of college and university reactions to illnesses such as yellow fever and the 1918 influenza pandemic…

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown…

As it entered the ranks of the "modern" university in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the University of North Carolina (UNC), as did other universities of the time, embraced the development of manhood and self-improvement as part of its mission. But unlike the social and economic pressures on northern and eastern universities to…

In the early 1960s, Peace Corps staff turned to American colleges and universities to prepare young Americans for volunteer service abroad. In doing so, the agency applied the university's modernist conceptions of citizenship education to volunteer training. The training staff and volunteers quickly discovered, however, that prevailing methods of…

As the author of this article read through the fascinating ruminations of Drs. Albisetti, Finkelstein, Thelin, and Urban, it seemed to him that two basic points emerge, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, Albisetti, Finkelstein, and Urban are asking historians of education to move away from national frames of reference to either a…

The "Partial Agenda for Modern European Educational History" proposed by Albisetti focuses primarily on the nineteenth century, and on some large-scale trends and issues, such as those relating to education and secondary instruction for women. Discussing this issue implies--especially in the diverse and heterogeneous context of…

What topic would you choose if you had the luxury of writing forever? In this article, John Thelin provides his response: He would opt to write about the history of higher education in a way that relies on quantitative data. "Numbers, please!" is his research request in taking on a longitudinal study of colleges and universities over…

Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. The difficulty women had in becoming professors had a…

In September 1830 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with some leaders of the Choctaw Nation. The treaty reinforced the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, which paved the way for the large-scale physical removal of tens of thousands of tribal people of the southeast, including many of the Choctaw. It provided…

Recent historiography has documented the singular contributions made by women to racial uplift and progress during the Jim Crow era. In these endeavors, women's contributions were greatly shaped by race, gender, and class. Given the feminization of education in the United States during this time, it is not surprising that their "race work" was for…

At the turn of the century approximately a thousand white Southern women braved the consternation of friends and sometimes family, and traveled hundreds of miles to attend the best Northern women's colleges for an education unavailable to them in the South. For many, the experience was revolutionary: they developed self-confidence, independence,…

The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of postsecondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nation's campuses, taking advantage of a little…

In the late 1820s, African Americans' access to primary and religious instruction expanded significantly throughout the urban Northeast, yet barriers to their higher education remained firm. Segregated in public "African" schools, blacks were also barred from most private academies. Collegiate education similarly remained out of reach.…

This article reflects on three narratives that affected American women's participation in higher education during the first twenty years after World War II. In hindsight, the educators of the 1950s and early 1960s may seem gratuitously meek and self-effacing. In comparison to later efforts, their activism can appear unnecessarily limited and too…

In this article, the author first read "The Emergence of the American University" by Lawrence R. Veysey, nearly twenty years ago as a graduate student. She has consulted it innumerable times since, and remains impressed by its ambitious scope, careful research and elegant prose. She has always wondered if Veysey's interest in the history…