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Reclaiming Religion: New Historiographic Challenges in the Relationship of Religion and American Higher Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Linda Eisenmann
Linda Eisenmann*
Affiliation:
Higher Education Administration at University of Massachusetts Boston, and editor of the Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998)
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Extract

In 1991 historian F. Michael Perko offered a literature review, “Religious Higher Education in America: An Historiographic Survey,” that provided a solid analysis of the state of historical work on religion and higher education, as well a discussion of issues facing historians wishing to apply that lens to collegiate history. Perko was discouraged as he reviewed the field, noting “the present bleak state of the enterprise,” where many authors “failed consistently to situate their subjects within broad frames of reference, and have ignored, for the most part, the interpretive dimensions that give historical study purpose and life.” During the 1990s, however, there has been a minor explosion in solid, creative work on various historical aspects of religion and higher education that begins to provide interpretive depth and scope. This essay extends Perko's review by discussing recent developments in certain aspects of the history of religion and American higher education.

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Conversation
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , Fall 1999 , pp. 295 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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3 Interestingly, another scholar of American religious history charges that historians generally have not attended well to the major influences of parochial schools and American Catholics on education in this country. See Tender, Leslie Woodcock “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,“ American Quarterly, 45 (March 1993): 104–127. Overall, Tender agrees with Perko that the history of American Catholicism has remained marginalized and apparently holds little interest for mainstream historians.Google Scholar

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23 Gleason's work, Contending With Modernity, offers the best discussion of (and perhaps antidote to) Catholics’ continuing efforts to reconcile their religious beliefs with a twentieth-century collegiate curriculum. As Gleason and Tender note, the Catholic part of this university history generally has been disregarded. See also Tender, , “On the Margins.“Google Scholar

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