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…

This article focuses on historical admissions policies and offers a more nuanced and more substantial treatment of the relationship between Populism and higher education. Prior accounts of admissions in the late nineteenth century have sensibly focused upon the tension between secondary school leaders who were mindful of their multiple…

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…

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.…