It is a gracious and trusting tradition that allows the president of this Society considerable latitude in selecting a subject for this annual address. I hope I have not violated that trust by proposing to discuss a topic that, by its title, may convey marks of a parochial and narrowly conceived (if not contrived) theme. For a southerner to talk on the southern past is perhaps bad enough; but for one who teaches at the University of Virginia to dare focus on that same institution runs the risk of exceeding all bounds of courtesy and custom, to say nothing of decent historical conventions and canons of scholarship. Still, begging your indulgence, I shall seek to explore with you some possible linkages between cultural ideals and youthful conduct that gave a special cast to student life and identity in antebellum Virginia.

Endowments for charitable purposes, including schools, have existed for centuries, usually in former times associated with religion, as in the Christian and Islamic worlds, in Jewish communities, and doubtless elsewhere. Most often under older conditions they consisted in the right to receive income from land, or from land and buildings, under whatever provisions for tenure and ownership might prevail from one place to another. They have generally been “perpetual,” that is, intended to pass unchanged from one generation to the next. Much has been written on the origins of such endowments or foundations. Less attention has been given to how they may end.

The rural teacher is a familiar and sad character in Russian literature. Yet little hard information has been forthcoming with which to verify impressions gleaned from fiction. Western as well as Soviet historians have pointed out that the teacher eked out a miserable existence, was usually a dropout from advanced schools, and was often of a radical cast of mind. Moreover, they have documented the failure of Russian primary schoolteachers to organize, to set and police their own standards of competence, or even to win the respect of the more elevated professions requiring a higher education for entry.

In the late 1960s great fanfares announced the emergence of a “new history of education.” According to John E. Talbott, “historians have begun to stake new claims in the history of education.” A formerly neglected and somewhat stagnant field started to bustle with excitement in anticipation of novel insights. In retrospect, it took quite a peculiar conjunction of circumstances to create this history of education in “a new key.” While the claims of social history were transforming the study of the past, a gradual “rehistorization” opened the social sciences to longer time perspectives and the political debate about the “troubled state of contemporary education” made educators more interested in the antecedents of the current crisis.