The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of “culture” because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both reason and civilization. Performance in print earned the laurel of humanity. Consequently, for well over 200 years, the African-American literary tradition has been defined as one in which books talked and a few slave authors achieved, at once, voice and significance by making a book talk back by writing.

The gubernatorial election of 1892 unnerved faculty members at Kansas State Agricultural College (KSAC). Voted into office by a “fusion” of Populists and Democrats, Governor Lorenzo Lewelling filled four vacant seats on the college's seven-member governing board, overturning a Republican Party majority for the first time in the college's history. These new regents included radicals such as Edward Secrest, a farmer who pledged to “change the order of things” at KSAC, and Christian Balzac Hoffman, a miller, banker, and politician who had founded an ill-fated socialist colony in Topolobampo, Mexico. Populist interest in KSAC intensified in 1897, when a different fusionist governing board promoted Professor Thomas E. Will to the college presidency. Born on an Illinois farm, Will attended a normal school before proceeding to Harvard University, where he chaffed within “the citadel of a murderous economic system.” When offered the chair of political economy at KSAC, Will had been lecturing, writing for reform periodicals, and serving as secretary of a Christian socialist organization called The Boston Union for Practical Progress. Although he never formally joined a Populist organization, Will shared the movement's commitment to erasing class distinctions in politics and education. Following Will's inauguration, a Populist regent exulted that the masses had finally “scaled the gilded halls of the universities.”

In October 1961 Basil H. G. Chaplin sent an excited letter to A. J. Dowuona-Hammond, Ghana's Minister of Education. Just four years earlier, the nation had won its independence from England. Now, Chaplin wrote, it stood on the cusp of a second great upheaval: “a complete revolution in Science teaching.” As chair of Ghana's Science Education Research Unit, Chaplin had conducted a study of 2,000 Ghanaian children and forty-two teachers over three years. Ghanaians learned best via activities and observation rather than from rote memorization, Chaplin reported, just like students in the West did. “Ghanaian children differ in no way from their British or American counterparts in their initial ability to understand how things work when using their hands and their eyes,” Chaplin told Dowuona-Hammond. “Different cultural backgrounds do not affect ability to interpret their own simple experience.” Too often, Chaplin admitted, Ghanaian teachers snuffed out students' natural curiosity with a rigid diet of lectures and textbook exercises. But the Ministry could change all of that, he insisted, by reforming the curriculum and re-educating the teachers. “It is wholly practical” Chaplin underlined, enclosing his proposed scheme. “Teachers need only a short course of training.”

Writing in this journal in 1993, Marjorie Theobald examined the history of middle-class women's education in late-eighteenth-century Britain and its transference and adaptation to colonial Australia in the nineteenth century. She questioned both the British historical perception that before the middle of the nineteenth century middle-class parents showed little, if any, interest in their daughters' education, and the Australian assumption that the transplantation of the private female academy (or seminary) was simply a reflection of the scramble for respectability by a small middle class scattered among a convict society. Theobald found that, as in Britain by the early 1800s, these schools—all private and run for profit by the wives and daughters of clergy and other professional men—shared a remarkably similar curriculum, generally advertised as “An English education with the usual accomplishments.” This was not, she argued, an elementary education, but rather was rooted in the liberal arts tradition and had been influenced by the search for stability within a rapidly industrializing Britain. The daughters of the British middle classes were to be taught how to deploy their learning discreedy, to ensure that it was at the service of their domestic role and civilizing influence.

During and after the American Civil War, individual state governments, faced with numerous economic demands, struggled to meet the needs of soldiers and their families. Among other pressing questions, they had to decide what to do with the massive number of dependent children orphaned by the war. Pennsylvania, a state that contributed the second most soldiers to the Union cause (only New York contributed more) suffered heavy losses. More than 15,000 Pennsylvania soldiers died in battle or of mortally inflicted battlefield wounds during the conflict. When one factored in death from disease and other causes, the number of Pennsylvania casualties exceeded 33,000. In addition to those who died, many others had their lives shortened by wartime injuries and diseases. Thousands more Pennsylvania soldiers survived the battle and its aftermath, but suffered severe injuries and were left too disabled to work. As a result, an unprecedented number of children became either full orphans or half orphans (those with mothers still living) or lived in families without adequate income to support them.

In September 1915, Minne Allen traveled from her native Germany to the United States, where her new husband Edward was set to begin a position as math instructor in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. Although Minne was nervous about moving from cosmopolitan Berlin to a small college town and worried about the war ravaging Europe, she was excited to begin her married life. Four years later, the University of Michigan Board of Regents initiated dismissal proceedings against her husband, alleging that he had supported Germany in the recently concluded war. Even before Edward's removal, Minne had grown tired of the constant suspicion and surveillance that the university and her hyper-patriotic neighbors forced her and her husband to endure. She wrote to her mother:

I am a narrative historian. By narrative, I mean the telling of a story to explain and analyze events and human agency in order to increase understanding. As a narrative historian, I have not made extensive use of theory in my analysis of past events. In fact, in the past I consistently rejected theory, considering it more of a hindrance than a help.

The historian Geoffrey Roberts stated, “History is frequently labelled an idiographical discipline as opposed to a nomothetic one, that is, a discipline whose knowledge objects are particular, individual, and specific rather than classes of phenomena which are abstracted and subsumed in generalisations about trends, patterns and causal determinations.” In this vein, it was my view—as Peter Burke noted—that history examines particulars and “attend to concrete detail,” while theory attends to “general rules and screen[s] out the exceptions.”

In early September 1956, Martha Rutledge—the president of the all-white Alabama State Parent-Teacher Association—released a statement to the press intended to clarify the organization's position on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the desegregation of schools in her state:

On Tuesday morning, May 1, 1928, Frank Callen, an African-American Superintendent of the Boys' Club of Savannah, came to the podium and stood before a sea of his white colleagues at the 22nd Annual Convention of the Boys' Club Federation in Birmingham, Alabama. Convention advertisements called boys' workers to the “Sunny South” through tales of fried chicken, hot biscuits served with the nectar from Alabama clover, and a region called Dixie that was “twice as nice as paradise.” The Federation had selected Birmingham as the site for its inaugural convention in the South to kick off their efforts to expand the number of Clubs in this region. Since its inception in 1906, the Clubs within the Federation had primarily provided service to white immigrant boys in the urban northeast, but this was rapidly changing as the number of Clubs in African-American communities had steadily risen over the last six years.

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take regular courses in the disciplines, they studied an integrated curriculum referred to as “Area Relationships.” Some faculty collaborated, team taught, and drew on students' prior knowledge. Even some administrators joined in the role-playing for the big culminating activity. The head of the program explained the reason for such a break from the traditional Stanford experience: “Special effort must be made to supply the student with points of view and methods of procedure which will enable him most quickly and most surely to survey a situation, analyze a problem, and formulate a solution.”

Almost forty years since the publication of Cutler's landmark “Oral history—its nature and uses for educational history,” growing numbers of historians of education have adopted oral interviews as the basis for historical analysis. Furthermore, questions about the objectivity of oral sources in view of memory's fallibility have been more productively redirected toward exploring, in light of credibility standards borrowed from the social sciences and literary theory, the many hues of subjectivity of oral historical testimonies, and their implications for understanding same past events from multiple perspectives. As Portelli aptly states, “the first thing that makes oral history different, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning” He boldly asserts that “what informants believe is indeed a historical fact “that is, the fact that they believe it”, as much as what really happened.” Oral historians not only reproblematized memory for historians by focusing attention on understanding the subjectivity of memory as a manifestation of historical consciousness, but they also brought to our attention how memories are gendered, racialized, and class based. They brought to our attention the importance of examining why different individuals and groups experience the same event in very different ways. Today, oral sources, particularly since the 1990s when historians began investigating the construction of identities, are compared less pejoratively with documentary sources by academic disciplinarians. And oral historians continue to break down “boundaries between the educational institution and the world, between the [history] profession and ordinary people.” However, they also continue to be faced with the challenge of articulating “the connection between individual and social historical consciousness.”

Throughout American history, African American communities have fought for desegregated education, equal school funding, and the right to a quality education. Many activists and scholars have long believed that a racially desegregated education would be the best way to educate citizens in a democratic society. Segregated education has historically been a reality for many African Americans throughout the nation. Before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) successfully won the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court case, much of the attention to racial segregation was paid to the South, although there had been numerous cases fought in the North before the Brown decision. After Brown, the NAACP decided to take their school desegregation litigation to the North in an effort to fight de facto segregation. The federal government also became involved in school desegregation with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Title IV and VI) and through the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the Justice Department who enforced the act. Court cases, along with the federal government efforts, pushed school districts in the North and South to desegregate.

At the moment of its founding in 1911, Connecticut College for Women exhibited a curricular tension between an emphasis on the liberal arts, which mirrored the elite men's and women's colleges of the day, and vocational aspects, which made it a different type of women's college, one designed to prepare women for the kind of lives they would lead in twentieth-century America. Connecticut was a women's college that simultaneously embraced the established brand of education practiced by its prestigious Seven Sister neighbors and forged its own path by integrating elements of home economics, municipal housekeeping, and professional/clerical training into its academic program. For forty years Connecticut College for Women achieved a balance between those two opposing poles of its curriculum.

On June 2, 1947, British Columbia Indian Agent F. Earl Anfield requested that the Prince Rupert Board of Trustees allow the seventeen children of Port Essington Indian Day School to attend Port Essington Elementary at an annual cost to federal authorities of $65.00 per child. The trustees' approval of the request led to the permanent closure of the fifty-eight-year-old Methodist-established day school and marked British Columbia's first large-scale integration initiative. The event would not have been significant were it not for the fact it occurred two years before the passage of provincial legislation—and four years before federal legislation—that would enable it.

According to historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” If each society has a regime of truth, it can be inferred that each scholarly discipline or field of study has its own general politics of truth which regulates its intellectual conditions, boundaries, and memberships. Consequently, Foucault's assertion leads me to ask: What regime of truth operates in the field of history of education? What types of discourse does it accept as true and deem as false? How does it distinguish between and sanction true and false statements? What value and status are conferred upon those charged with saying what counts as true and those considered saying what counts as false or unacceptable? What are the effects of such a regime on the field's analytical and methodological development as well as on its practitioners?

This essay reviews two books on Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund and places them within the historiography of the Fund. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, is a biography written by Peter M. Ascoli. The book entitled The Rosenwald Schools of the American South written by Mary S. Hoffschwelle is a study of the rural school-building program with which the Fund is most closely associated. Ascoli's biography joins three other new biographies of early philanthropists that were published in 2006: David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie; Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America by Ruth R. Crocker; and David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life (Katz, p. B6).