As primary civilizing forces, science and formal education have achieved a position of dominance and prestige in modern society. In the United States, efforts to institutionalize these two cultural commitments became especially strong during the decades preceding the Civil War. Historians of science, such as Robert Bruce, have argued that the antebellum period saw the “launching” of American science. During the years before the Civil War, many institutional forms were established, patterns of patronage were begun, and the scientific community was organized around professional ideals. Writing about the same period, historians of education have stressed the origins of government-supported common school systems, the rise of educational professionals and professional societies, and the growth of specialized training in higher education. Despite these parallel concerns, there has been little exploration of the place of science in educational reforms of this period or of the importance of education in efforts to upgrade the antebellum scientific community.

An examination of the Protestant women's home mission enterprise at the turn of this century offers an opportunity to chart the process by which women reformers came to redefine the responsibilities of civil government, a crucial first step in the fashioning of a welfare state. More importantly, it provides insight into the alteration of the existing social relations between different ethnic groups. The welfare state was not just the creation of one class, or one group, of social reformers. Like those who provided social services, those who received the services played a central role in their development. In her critique of the argument that welfare agencies were little more than instruments of social control, Linda Gordon has written that the “social control experience was not a simple two-sided tradeoff in which the client sacrificed autonomy and control in return for some material help. Rather, the clients helped shape the nature of the social control itself.” Gordon concludes that we err in thinking of the “welfare state” only as a “campaign spearheaded by elites,” and in so doing may overlook the “pressure” that clients or recipients exerted for these welfare reforms. The welfare state was not just a paternalistic agency of social control but was also a means by which oppressed groups could gain greater autonomy and empowerment.

In 1965 Laurence Veysey published what has remained the definitive study of the transformation of the American university in the late nineteenth century. Over twenty-five years later, there is as yet no similarly comprehensive history of what could be called the second transformation of the university—the emergence of the post—World War II “multiversity.” There is, however, a large literature on the postwar university, both appreciative and critical, from which has emerged the generally accepted account of this transformation. This account idealizes the prewar university as a tightly knit community of scholars and scientists, dedicated to the expansion and transmission of knowledge, and portrays the university's postwar transformation, through federal support for research, into a disparate collection of scientists and scholars sharing only the goals of serving a variety of publics and advancing their own careers. If the prevailing image of the prewar university has been the “ivory tower,” the postwar image has been the federally funded laboratory, staffed with researchers who are exempt from, or little interested in, teaching, and who work in large groups with expensive scientific equipment.