From the time the first American edition issued forth from the pioneer Cambridge press of Stephen Daye in 1639, the almanac was destined to play a significant role in the education of the American people. Indeed, an almanac had played a not inconsiderable supporting role in the discovery of America itself, as it was one of the chief navigational aids of one Christopher Columbus.

The nature of the American college during the Colonial and early national periods has concerned many educational historians. Questions of curricula, organization and finance have been frequently posed and often answered. Yet these approaches have ignored perhaps the most central element in the collegiate scene: the professors.

As he prepared to leave office and active politics, George Washington offered the American people some advice based on a lifetime of thought and conviction.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government…. Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” He went on to write in the same address that religion and morality were essential to national prosperity and to stability and happiness. Washington spoke as a gentleman, a republican it is true, but nevertheless a man schooled in a long tradition of courtesy.

The boston school board added to its problems by its choice of a successor to Philbrick. The man elected, Samuel Eliot (a relative of Harvard's president), had little practical experience in the administration of public education. Born in Boston in 1821, Eliot had graduated first in his class from Harvard at the age of eighteen. Following graduation he toured Europe and wrote a series of history books, including The History of Rome, The Early Christians and a Manual of U.S. History. In 1856 Eliot became Professor of History and Political Science in Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and from 1860 to 1866 he served as its president. In 1874 (the intervening eight years are vague) he became principal of the Girls' High and Normal School in Boston but resigned the position after only two years because of ill health and family bereavement. Eliot, a scholar and a nearly rank amateur in public school affairs, appealed to the reformist element of the school board, and his reports quickly made it evident that he sympathized with the faction that had deposed Philbrick. Eliot's difficulties were compounded by his snobbish social darwinism and isolation from the schools. As a practical administrator, he was generally inept. By contrast to Philbrick his reports were filled not with pragmatic discussions of practical subjects but with long and florid discourses more suitable to a late nineteenth-century literary magazine than to the report of an urban superintendent.

Identification of American college professors prior to 1800 is a difficult task. Those below were listed as professors at the nineteen American colleges that granted degrees before 1800. Faculty registers, school catalogs and school histories were used in compiling a tentative list. When biographical study indicated that a man was probably a tutor rather than a professor, his name was removed. Some names, for which no data exist, remain, which probably should have been removed.

The influence of higher education on the history and development of eighteenth-century Colonial America greatly exceeded the small existing institutions and the relatively few scholars which they enrolled. When the American Revolution erupted in 1775, there were but nine scattered collegiate schools within the colonies, and only two of them had been in existence for over thirty-five years. Most of these colonial colleges operated under the restrictive limitations of poor plant facilities, inadequate libraries, little or no endowments, sectarian domination, an authoritarian discipline system and a curriculum which was largely a carry-over from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europe. By 1775 the combined enrollment of all these institutions was less than thirteen hundred students and their alumni totaled less than one percent of the entire population. Yet the importance of the end product of the higher educational system in the colonies far outweighed its limited quality or its few participating members. College-trained theologians generally dominated religious thought; their pervasive importance was apparent in the social, economic and intellectual circles of their respective colonies, and their influence in political affairs was illustrated by the fact that one third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were graduates of a colonial college.

The traditional historian's view of eighteenth-century English education is that it was an era moribund in both educational ideas and practice. “It is a dark picture” in William Boyd's phrase; “a dull and barren record”; or in J. E. G. de Montmorency's term, “a century of educational sleep.” Studies of the dissenting academies and charity schools by Irene Parker and Herbert McLachlan and others, however, have suggested that there was at least some restlessness in the sleep. More recently Nicholas Hans in New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century maintains that the era was in fact the beginning of “modern” education in England: “Many of the ideas of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, which at the time were declared to be radical innovations, were enunciated and practiced in the eighteenth century.” The private academy especially, Hans points out, was a seminal institution. The academy masters, he states, “… were able and efficient teachers who must be considered as pioneers of modern education.”

My interest in collecting old textbooks began about thirty years ago when I was teaching a late afternoon graduate course in the history of American education. One afternoon while discussing the Colonial Period, I mentioned the hornbook, the New England Primer, Dilworths' New Guide to the English Tongue and Websters' so-called Blueback. After class a county superintendent of schools, who was a member of the class, waited for me and asked if I would like to have some old school books. (My knowledge then of the above-mentioned books was merely from reading about them in a history of education textbook.) My reply was “yes.” Several weeks later he brought me an old copy of a Union Spelling Book. That aroused my interest in collecting other old textbooks. But where would I secure them?