On the night of November 11, 1817, nineteen-year-old Rufus Choate rushed to Dartmouth Hall from his Hanover boarding room to answer a call of alarm from his classmates. Professors from Dartmouth University, an institution recently created by legislative action, “had violently attacked” the student library under Choate's care “and, after an unsuccessful attempt to force the lock, literally hewed down the door” with an axe. Choate, who rejected these professors as figures of authority, joined his peers to temporarily lock the intruders in an adjoining room while they removed their books. News of the incident enraged the already volatile debate about the future of Dartmouth. Because the library riot involved generational violence, the professors accused the students of immaturity in an effort to exclude them from the Dartmouth debate. But students found that claims of immaturity could cut both ways. Although students occupied a liminal position between dependence and independence, it was not despite their youth, but because of it that they influenced the outcome of the case. The library riot, then, is important not only for understanding the social context of the Dartmouth case, but also the ways young men interpreted the meaning of youth and maturity in the Early Republic.

At first I thought he was a baseball fan from Cleveland. As he came closer I saw the cross on his blue and red cap, and I realized I had seen this guy before. I was staffing a GOHI exhibit at the Columbus gay pride parade. GOHI is the Gay Ohio History Initiative, a group of volunteers who formed a partnership with the Ohio Historical Society in 2006 to “preserve, archive, and curate Ohio's LGBT history and culture.” Interestingly, the “preeminent history preservation organization” in Ohio is serving as a model of collaboration for public educational institutions concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) history. This may strike one as curious given that two out of three Ohio voters supported a constitutional ban on marriage equality in 2004 even though the state legislature had already adopted a similar measure. The state also does not prohibit employment or housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Yet Columbus maintains a national reputation as a “gay-friendly” city, suggesting that the political terrain in Ohio is as mixed as ever. The old saw—“As goes Ohio so goes the nation”—still seems pertinent.

This address derives from the intellectual contributions of young scholars and doctoral students, in faded memory of my life as a doctoral student and young scholar. I was tempted by other topics. One was the definition of the schoolteacher as the penultimate professional from a Deweyan perspective. I decided I would be, as we like to say in the Christ-haunted South, preaching to the choir. Another choice, one that deeply intrigues me, was the college movie, but indeed that topic was continuously marred by insubstantial acting and script.

On a hot afternoon in July 1923, former Dallas dentist and national Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Evans took the podium at the first annual national meeting of the revived organization. By the time of this meeting, the Klan had again become infamous for its reputation of intolerance and vigilante violence. It had also become enormously popular among native-born white Protestants. In states such as Indiana and Colorado, the Klan briefly seized control of state and local politics. In spite of vigorous and scathing attacks from liberals and minority groups, between three and six million native-born Protestant white men rushed to join the secret order. At least another half-million women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Some even claimed that President Warren Harding took the membership oath in a secret White House ceremony. The appeal of the organization has been explained by historians as evidence of a variety of cultural trends, including worries over lax Prohibition enforcement, desires to enforce white racial dominance, fears caused by increasing immigration rates and labor unrest, and anxiety about changing cultural mores. While each of these issues was part of the revived Klan's allure, the shrewd “Imperial Wizard” chose another topic to electrify his audience. “The greatest duty of America today,” Evans thundered, “is to build up our educational system.”

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, providing millions of dollars for math, science, and foreign language instruction. By the early 1960s, educators and academics began to reexamine other aspects of the curriculum as well. Their efforts prompted two changes in the social studies: one was a shift from worksheets and memorization to the investigative approach of the “new social studies,” the other a requirement that schools teach about the specter of international Communism. Much has been written about the first of these reforms, surprisingly little about the second. Yet, insofar as the new social studies grew out of Cold War imperatives, instruction about Communism provides an interesting perspective on its tenure in American schools. In fact, a closer examination of the relationship between the two might force us to reconsider current assumptions about the nature of curriculum reform during the period.

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. “What law of nature is it,” Ladd-Franklin wondered in 1890, “that says that it is fitting for women to be the teachers of young persons of both sexes in preparatory schools, but that it is not fitting that they should teach young persons in college?” This supposed “law” hurt not only women who were qualified to be professors, like the scientist and mathematician Ladd-Franklin, but also the larger number of college-educated American women who turned to teaching in primary and secondary schools after graduation. As Ladd-Franklin explained, the difficulty women had in becoming professors had a profound effect on women who taught at lower levels. Because women were “thought to be not worthy of being college professors,” it was “impossible for them to receive equal pay with men in the secondary schools.” The solution to the problem of inequality in schools and colleges, Ladd-Franklin believed, lay in proving that individual women could perform as well as men; this “entering wedge” would prop open the door for future women. But as Ladd-Franklin's life and work show, there were limits to a strategy that focused on individuals in institutions.

Over a decade ago Jurgen Herbst, in a retrospective review of the field of educational history, noted with considerable perturbation that educational historiography had grown tired and dull. “The revisionist surge, whether traditional or radical, has spent itself,” said Herbst, and nothing new or interesting has emerged to replace it. A year later, in March of 2000, a major invitation-only conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation was held to discuss the state of the field. Some of the conference's conclusions were published by Ruben Donato and Marvin Lazerson, who prefaced their comments on the current state of the field with a refresher on the “Golden Era” of the late 1960s and 1970s, noting that for many, in the words of one attendee, the passion of those days “is somehow lost. We don't know where we're heading. We don't know what we're doing.”

Although not entirely neglected, the history of preschool reform and child study in Canada is understudied. Historians have documented the fate of “progressivism” in Canadian schooling through the 1930s along with postwar reforms that shaped the school system through the 1960s. But there are few case studies of child study centers and laboratory schools in Canada, despite their popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century. Histories of child study and child development tend to focus on the well-known Institute of Child Study directed by the renowned William E. Blatz in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto (U of T). Yet there were over twenty other child study centers established in Canadian universities during the 1960s and 1970s directed by little-known figures such as Alice Borden and Grace Bredin at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

President G. Stanley Hall hung only a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his office at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The philosopher embodied Hall's most cherished mid-nineteenth century ideas that comprised part of his intellectual worldview. In the 1840s, Emerson reflected on his transcendental concepts of the common mind and instinct, which held all innate human knowledge and behavioral patterns, in his Essays:

During the period between 1870 and 1920, the gross national product of the United States increased more than sixfold, as revolutions in transportation, communications, and manufacturing sparked growth in the economy. Large industrial corporations emerged, and their growing power presented grave challenges for social policy, while their wealth enriched an unprecedented number of millionaires and multi-millionaires, whose contributions prompted an enormous increase in philanthropy across the nation. In particular, Andrew Carnegie sold his steel companies for $480,000,000 in 1901 and founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1902, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. Even more prominent, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, “the most famous American of his day,” devoted $447,000,000 to endowing the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in 1901, the General Education Board in 1903, the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1918.

Floree Smith, a teacher in Marion County, Mississippi remembered that participating in the Head Start program “made a difference in our lives, our home lives, our church lives, and it made it so beautiful and it was a help for the children and it was a help to us too.” The program etched in Mrs. Smith's memory involves Mississippi teachers, sharecroppers, store clerks, preachers, landowners, civil rights activists, and other local people who galvanized the Freedom Movement and democratized the field of education by organizing 280 Head Start centers that served 21,000 children across the state of Mississippi during the summer of 1965. This article examines the history of Head Start, a federally funded program, whose conceptualization emerged in earlier phases of the Civil Rights Movement in order to provide education, nourishing meals, medical services, and a positive social environment for children about to enter the first grade. While Head Start was implemented in states other than Mississippi, a focus on the development of Head Start in Mississippi is particularly significant because it illuminates the ways in which local people placed equitable educational access and opportunity at the center of the broader Civil Rights Movement and broadens our understanding of how local people used, and in several cases essentially created, federal programs to address deeply contextual issues. Furthermore, by illuminating the significance of Head Start and thus federal programs within the Civil Rights Movement, this article demonstrates how the rise of the New Right in the mid and late 1960s was a reaction to a racialized “Welfare State” and the programs like Head Start associated with it.

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 attention. French and German heads-of-state readily pointed to the joint history textbook as a shining example of the close and positive relations between their two countries, while their governments heralded the book for “symbolically sealing Franco-German reconciliation.” Beyond European shores, East Asian commentators in particular have taken note of Franco-German textbook collaboration, citing it as a possible model for how to work through their own region's often antagonistic past. Diplomatic praise is not mere hyperbole. From the Franco-Prussian War (1870) through World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), France and Germany were widely perceived to be “hereditary enemies.” The publication of Histoire/Geschichte embodies one of the most crucial developments in modern international relations: the emergence of France and Germany as the “linchpin” of the New Europe.

In the early 1970s the first large cohorts of Chicano PhD scholars entered academia, often hired into faculty positions at newly created Chicano departments or centers. These Chicano scholars came after earlier pioneer Mexican-American historians such as Carlos Castañeda and George I. Sanchez at the University of Texas, Austin; Julian Samora of the University of Notre Dame; and Carlos Cortes of the University of California, Riverside. Instead, they came of age during the fluorescence of the Chicano movimiento of the 1960s and 1970s. The academic identities of the first Chicano PhD scholars were firmly grounded in Chicanismo, a term which emphasizes ethnic nationalism, political and economic equity, and cultural and community pride.

One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called “the end of classical politics,” abandoning virtue in the name of commerce and liberal individualism. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pocock writes, “A condition of thought … in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for the market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found.” Later historians sought to extend republicanism's life into the nineteenth century, identifying figures and institutions who held fast to the tradition against the prevailing commercial and industrial winds, while others have taken the ambiguity of republicanism's end to suggest that no such coherent worldview existed in the United States, which was from the outset a liberal project employing only an occasional and misleading republican vocabulary. Even Wood, whose Radicalism of the American Revolution specifically set out to narrate the transformation of American political ideology from the Revolution to the ascent of the Jeffersonians, offers a general account of shifting rhetorical emphases—from virtue to equality, the common good to self-interest—but not the contours of this shift in any specific realm of American life.

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 from historical memory. Alongside economic titans were other pioneers. Just as zealous New England reformers sought to bring Yankee enlightenment to the benighted South after the Civil War, other New Englanders looked to the West. For several of these pioneers, establishing Christian churches and colleges to serve the new populations was their mission. One of these individuals was Congregationalist minister Edward P. Tenney, whose conceived life's goal was to found a Christian college that would serve as the centerpiece of education on the frontier. Tenney was not unique, but he was exceptional in the scope and passion of his vision.

In 1941, members of the local unit of the Florida State Teachers Association (FSTA) met in Tampa to plan a lawsuit against Hillsborough County's school board for paying African-American teachers less than white teachers. Hilda Turner, who taught history and economics at Tampa's historically black high school, agreed to serve as plaintiff; she was the only one to volunteer. Thurgood Marshall chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s Legal Defense Fund (LDF), assisted Samuel McGill, a Jacksonville attorney, in representing Turner, who filed a complaint in federal court that November. In the fall of 1942, responding to Turner's suit, Hillsborough County school board dropped the race-tiered salary schedule and adopted a “rating” scale that based teachers' pay on a number of factors other than training and experience, including “physical, health, personality, and character,” “scholarship and attitude,” and “instructional skill and performance.” The rating committee charged with classifying teachers placed 84 percent of white teachers in the highest pay bracket, and 80 percent of African-American teachers in the lowest pay bracket. As in other Florida cases, Hillsborough County school board offered the new rating scale as evidence that the district no longer discriminated on the basis of race, an assertion Marshall attempted to challenge at trial. However, in 1943, two years after Turner's complaint was originally filed, the federal district judge ruled that the new salary scale was “fair on its face.”