Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society represents, perhaps, the most significant text in the history of the field. In this essay, I argue that Bailyn's classic text can, and should, be contextualized in the post-World War II intellectual milieu of consensus liberalism that overtly rejected ideological commitment. Bailyn and other postwar consensus liberals considered academic research, conducted free from political ideology, to be the best antidote to the totalitarian thought of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Bailyn's famous text reflected the values of postwar consensus liberalism by rejecting the ideological commitments of the interwar period and embracing the objective, scientific values of the 1950s as reflected in the new intellectual and cultural history. Bailyn's emphasis on cultural-intellectual history as the best corrective for totalitarian thinking reflected the aspirations, hopes, and fears of his own moment in time, in the same way the progressives’ focus on conflict and reform reflected theirs.

This paper examines an “experimental” program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)—who believed in the value of liberal adult education for democratic citizenship—and several prominent black reformers who led the program. I argue that the program represented a negotiation between these two groups over whether the black culture, politics, and protest that had developed in 1920s Harlem could be deradicalized and incorporated within the funder's “elite liberalism”—an approach to philanthropy that emphasized ideological neutrality, scholarly professionalism, and political gradualism. In his role as the official evaluator, African American philosopher Alain Locke insisted that it could, arguing that the program, and its occasionally Afrocentric curriculum, aligned with elite liberal ideals and demonstrated the capacity for a broader definition of (historically white) liberal citizenship. While the program was ultimately abandoned in the mid-1930s, the efforts of Locke and other black reformers helped pave the way for a future instantiation of racial incorporation: the intercultural education movement of the mid-twentieth century.

In the early 1960s, Peace Corps staff turned to American colleges and universities to prepare young Americans for volunteer service abroad. In doing so, the agency applied the university's modernist conceptions of citizenship education to volunteer training. The training staff and volunteers quickly discovered, however, that prevailing methods of education in the university were ineffective for community-development work abroad. As a result, the agency evolved its own pedagogical practices and helped shape early ideas of service learning in American higher education. The Peace Corps staff and supporters nonetheless maintained the assumptions of development and modernist citizenship, setting limits on the broader visions of education emerging out of international volunteerism in the 1960s. The history of the Peace Corps training in the 1960s and the agency's efforts to rethink training approaches offer a window onto the underlying tensions of citizenship education in the modern university.

After teaching shifted from men's to women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century, women pushed into newly created realms of educational leadership. They earned appointments to principalships and, buoyed by the growing woman's suffrage movement, they began winning elected superintendencies and school board positions. However, fearing that women might overtake men in running the schools, a multifaceted backlash movement emerged to rein in women's advancements. A tightly organized national network of influential male educators sought to centralize power, standardize and mechanize practices, and otherwise push women out of leadership positions while simultaneously making teaching an increasingly servile profession. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's superintendent of schools who had long advocated for expanding women's public service, staunchly resisted this disempowerment of teachers. Instead, through her leadership, she vividly illustrated how schools might work if freedom, individuality, and community were truly honored.

Because Thomas Fallace's article focuses on a foundational historiographical work in the history of education as a field, the editors invited four intellectual historians to write responses, published below. In a final essay, Professor Thomas Fallace of William Paterson University replies to his respondents.

Historical analyses of 1960s university campus activism have focused on activities related to the civil rights movement, Free Speech Movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This study supplements the historiography of civil disobedience and political activity on college campuses during that tumultuous era with an account of the initiation of the disability rights movement with the Rolling Quads, a group of disabled student activists at the University of California, Berkeley. This small group, with little political experience and limited connections to campus and community activists, organized to combat the paternalistic managerial practices of the university and the California Department of Rehabilitation. Drawing from the philosophy and strategies of the seething political culture of 1969 Berkeley, the Rolling Quads formed an activist cell that expanded within less than a decade into the most influential disability rights organization in the country.

This article explores the role of university placement offices in shaping a twentieth-century corporate elite. While studies of the “corporatization” of the university focus on developments after the 1970s, the rise of the modern university and corporate economy were inextricably linked by the early twentieth century. Scholars of this period have described the circulation of scientific knowledge and the influx of college graduates into industry, but the specific ties that facilitated their employment remain underexplored. By examining the correspondence between placement officers and employers in Boston, I demonstrate how universities actively cultivated a new corporate class that not only had the right technical knowledge and social skills but the gender, racial, and class-based characteristics employers preferred. In so doing, universities helped incorporate these characteristics into the meaning of academic merit itself. The marriage of universities and corporate management legitimated a credential-based form of inequality that continues to structure the American political economy.

The nineteenth-century debate about the role of the US Bureau of Education was marked by negotiations between the civic republican language of antebellum common school advocacy and a social scientific language of educational professionalism. To advance this argument, this essay traces how members of Congress defined, criticized, and delimited the Bureau's institutional role between 1865 and 1872. First, avoiding calls for direct federal intervention, the Bureau's initial congressional advocates defined the Bureau as a vehicle for indirect influence on the states through the use of data and statistics. Second, after the Bureau's founding, its legislative critics used rhetoric to chastise and question both the Bureau's comprehensive vision and power. Finally, beginning with Commissioner John Eaton's tenure in 1870, the Bureau's functions were narrowed. Due to Eaton's reimagining of the Commissioner role, further congressional critique, and failed efforts to expand Bureau authority, the Bureau eventually became a government-sanctioned purveyor of social scientific expertise—one with little direct authority to intervene in education.

Established in 1911 as a simple owner-operated commercial school in Providence, Rhode Island, the Katharine Gibbs School expanded over the decades to acquire an international reputation for excellence in secretarial training. This essay examines the origin, development, and ultimate demise of the chain, placing it within the context of the expansion of office work and the growth of clerical education. In presenting a secretarial career as an attractive option for women, the school developed a gender-specific message that was very much in keeping with the vocationalism that became a major component of women's education in both public high schools and proprietary institutions. Promoting the career secretary as a desirable career path for women, Gibbs used class and gender-based marketing to separate itself from competitors. Thriving at a time when educated women had few opportunities, the school declined when the feminist upheavals of the 1960s sparked a new ethos of workplace egalitarianism and widening cultural definitions of self-fulfillment for women.

This article explores the efforts of Native Hawaiian students to appropriate and take control of their schooling as part of a broad Indigenous story of empowerment during Hawai‘i’s territorial years (1900–1959). Histories of this era lack a visible Indigenous presence and contribute to the myth that Natives passively accepted the Americanization of the islands. This article challenges this myth by examining Native student writings to tell a story of Native involvement in education as a pragmatic strategy designed to advance distinctly Indigenous interests through the American education system. These stories reveal schools as complex sites of negotiation where Native students regularly navigated sociocultural pressure from their friends, parents, teachers, and America's growing presence in the islands while testing and exploring their own identities.

British Columbia (BC) charted its own course in 1949 when it passed legislation permitting Indigenous children to be schooled in provincial public schools. That is, BC's law predated federal legislation allowing integrated schooling by two years. This paper examines how and why BC followed its own policy path with respect to the schooling of Indian children in the years immediately following World War II. It illustrates three key forces propelling BC's integration agenda: policy actors, ideas, and institutional structures. Indigenous and non-Indigenous policy actors were shaped by the discourse of ethical liberalism, an ideology that dominated BC's educational landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. Key policy actors succeeded in implementing integrated schooling in advance of federal legislation due, in part, to Canada's political institutions, which have facilitated regional autonomy in matters such as education. This study highlights the importance of telling regional histories in addition to those of the nation-state.

This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits for colonial peoples, including literacy, good government, and peace, and anti-colonial nationalists were caricatured as irrational and ungrateful. US global engagement during and after World War II gradually changed the narrative, particularly following Philippine independence in 1946, as texts subsequently portrayed the US as an enlightened decolonizer. Postwar textbooks tended to argue that nationalism was a product of Western ideas and that anti-colonial nationalism was a triumph for Western civilization. While constructing this narrative of the spread of Western values, textbook authors largely marginalized colonial actors, promoted unflattering and stereotyped views of Africans and Asians, and de-emphasized the extreme violence inherent in the decolonization process.

This essay explores the experiences and debates surrounding preparatory schools for Chinese students in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. These institutions attempted to expand educational opportunities for poorer Chinese students who might otherwise not have had a chance to go to school; however, most of these children also had families in the United States, who supported their children's education but also needed their help to sustain their families. American laws banned most forms of Chinese immigration, and families had to carefully maneuver through federal policies to enter the country as students, often turning to European Americans-who were invested in expanding U.S. involvement in China-for support. Because of anti-Chinese sentiments, consular and immigration authorities questioned these programs, making them difficult to sustain. Ultimately, the interactions between immigration and consular officials, education boosters, and Chinese students were integral to the development of preparatory schools for other international students in the twentieth century.

Between 1889 and 1890, John Wilson and his family were among nearly three thousand African American settlers to enter Oklahoma Territory, where Wilson's two daughters first attended an integrated school. The Wilson family was undoubtedly drawn by the educational and economic opportunities that were present in the fluid space—opportunities that did not always exist elsewhere in the country. Yet the territorial legislature sought to narrow those opportunities, which it did by segregating the schools. Wilson and his family did not accept this limitation and fought back through both the courts and active resistance. This article examines that first legal challenge to the segregated school system: Territory ex rel. Wilson v. Marion et al. This case informs not only our understanding of the durability of racism in an actively contested western space but also the forms of African American resistance to the reactivation of racial hierarchy.

The black southern press was an entity dominated by male editors and entrepreneurs. The effort to equalize teacher pay, one of the core fights for rights in the South, and the principal effort at gendered race advocacy during the World War II era, was led in large measure by black women. While both the fight for salary equalization and the survival of the black press depended upon segregation to maintain their survival, those newspapers were entities dominated by men advocating for equal salaries in a profession dominated by women, and the gendered nature of their coverage shaped knowledge of the fight within the black community.

As it entered the ranks of the “modern” university in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the University of North Carolina (UNC), as did other universities of the time, embraced the development of manhood and self-improvement as part of its mission. But unlike the social and economic pressures on northern and eastern universities to emphasize a more aggressive model of manhood, UNC's southern context allowed for a more flexible approach. UNC's leaders encouraged students to find for themselves a healthy mix of the older, more restrained Victorian notion of manhood with elements of the newer one, physical fitness being one example. The school's emphasis on inquiry and investigation, and the student body's racial and gender exclusivity, combined to permit a degree of openness as to what constituted an appropriate model of manhood.