In 1862, a free boy of color named Lucien Lamanière, age fourteen, wrote a letter addressed to Tampico, Mexico. After describing a trip he once took to Europe he explained to his friend: “I am going next year and I invite you to come we will go to Paris together before coming back to New Orleans, we will go and visit that fine country called Hayti and if you are not satisfied of those two countries, we will go and visit Mexico the finest country after Paris.” Not only was this an “imagined” letter (which I will explain) but it was also a rather fanciful one, since Lucien had planned an impossible voyage around the Atlantic. This impossibility becomes clear at the foot of his letter. As a postscript Lucien wrote, “since the blockade I have not heard from you.” Indeed, Federal troops were just off the coast of Louisiana, and a few months later the Union army had occupied the city of New Orleans.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools in England and Wales was created in November 1839, a few months after the establishment of the Committee of Council on Education, itself a symbol of the concern then mounting about the people's education. Before that, their schooling had been conducted entirely under voluntary auspices, mainly in the schools connected with the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society established in 1811 and 1814 respectively, to provide a basic education in literacy and numeracy, either within an Anglican or a more broadly Christian framework. In 1833 the state had eventually intervened by granting £20,000 to assist those Societies in building their schools, though each pound of grant had to be matched with locally raised funds.

“We came late enough to escape the self-consciousness and the belligerence of the pioneers, to take education and training for granted. We came early enough to take equally for granted professional positions in which we could make full use of our training. This was our double glory.” Speaking before an audience at the University of Michigan, her alma mater, in 1937 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then Dean of Smith College, reflected on the heady years during which she, Class of 1914, and her female contemporaries came of age. These lines, later published in a well-known essay entitled “The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto…,” are often quoted in histories of women's higher education to capture the circumstances—among them, peaking female enrollments, rising doctorates, and wartime employment—that buoyed the aspirations and career ambitions of college women in the early decades of the twentieth century. By vividly evoking the spirit of possibility that so deeply influenced women in the Progressive Era, Nicolson's description, in turn, offered an equally telling perspective on the disillusionment that many female graduates experienced later, in the wake of vastly changed employment realities and a widespread backlash against women's advances. “We did not realize that such fever is inevitably followed by reaction…. Within a decade shades of the prison house began to close.”