1 Regional differences have been a theme in the literature. This paper only examines the northern version of the academy, one with New England origins and fullest expression in the area stretching from the Hudson Valley to the Plains. Like Nancy Beadie, I have derived many of my examples from New York State. The South and West pose different problems in different stages of economic development.Google Scholar

2 When researching denominational “colleges” to write Gentlemen and Scholars (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), I initially ignored seemingly irrelevant material on their academies and other branches. My anachronist categories blinded me to the colleges’ financial dependence on those branches (whose enrollments often dwarfed the those of the college) and to the fact that these were multi-purpose campuses. After all, I was “doing” the history of higher education.Google Scholar

3 Even vocabulary is problematic. Modern classifications of elementary, secondary, and higher education distort discussion of academies that, although closest to the middle category, overlapped all three. Perhaps “higher schooling,” which echoes the contemporary term, “higher branches of learning”, frees us of anachronism. Two historians have recently invoked “higher schools” and “higher schooling.” Nancy Beadie, “From Student Markets to Credential Markets: The Creation of the Regents Examination System in New York State, 1864–1890,” History of Education Quarterly 39 (Spring 1999): 1–30, and William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), Ch. 2.Google Scholar

4 Bowen, M. Lucille “The Rochester Free Academy,“ in McKelvey, Blake (ed.), Education in Rochester (Rochester: n.p., 1939), 74–100.Google Scholar

5 Brown, David K. A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995). Brown's discussion of matching general attributes of educated people to white collar work, while written about colleges, is suggestive for understanding academies.Google Scholar

6 For the most nuanced description of the antebellum middle class, see Stuart Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

7 Theodore Sizer portrays the academy as an essentially rural institution. Sizer, Theodore (ed.), The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964), 40–41; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Reese, Origins of the American High School, xiv, distinguishes students in “higher branches” among 1) a majority in ungraded rural schools; 2) some in ‘union graded’ schools in villages and towns; and 3) a privileged minority in urban “palaces”, moving beyond a rural/urban dichotomy. O'Neil suggests that “centers of economic exchange”, not rural areas, were home to most academies. Edward O'Neil, “Private Schools and Public Vision: A History of Academies in Upstate New York, 1800–1860” (Ph. D. diss.: Syracuse University, 1984), 117–120. Geiger's, Roger assertion that small and medium towns provided the denominationalism and boosterism that best promoted multipurpose colleges reinforces the idea that market towns were academies’ natural habitat. “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” History of Higher Education Annual 15 (1995), 51–92.Google Scholar

8 Miller, George F. The Academy System of the State of New York (Albany, N.Y.: J.B.Lyon, 1922, repr. 1969), 42 and 76; Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 51–2, 117; Sizer, Age of the Academies, 25.Google Scholar

9 For an excellent case for viewing educators driving markets from the supply side, see Beadie's, “From Student Markets.” On multipurpose institutions combing academies with collegiate and other studies, see Geiger; “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges;” Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars; and Nancy Beadie, “From Academy to University in New York State,” History of Higher Education Annual 14 (1994), 13–38.Google Scholar

10 Beadie, “From Student Markets.“Google Scholar

11 There is a useful discussion of middle-class attitudes across the rural/urban spectrum in Blumin, Ch. 6 and Epilogue. See also Geiger on professions.Google Scholar

12 It would be very instructive to have a study of the levels of academy tuition in proportion to incomes and wealth. The 1850–1870 censuses could be usefully employed.Google Scholar

13 Too little is known about the impact of Catholic schools and of the Catholic hierarchy's battle for public funds on academies. In turn we need to know how many Catholics turned to academies and high schools rather than parochial schools for ethnic, financial, or other reasons.Google Scholar

14 Ueda, Reed Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 222–3. Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars, 189–209, 247–9.Google Scholar

15 Dedman, W. Wayne Cherishing This Heritage (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), 234–8.Google Scholar

16 Miller, Academy System of the State of New York, 57. Geiger, “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges,” 349, n. 2 quotes W.T. Harris’ saying in 1891 that colleges have raised their beginning level by a year and a half since the Civil War.Google Scholar

17 Sizer, Age of the Academies, 40–41.Google Scholar

18 For historiographic overviews see, O'Neil, “Private Schools and Public Vision,” Ch. 1; Beadie, “From Student Markets,” 27–30.Google Scholar