Few historians have analyzed the attitudes of major white progressive educators on race and ethnicity. Very little is known about what they did in the area of race relations and the schooling of minority and ethnic groups or about efforts sponsored by the Progressive Education Association to deal with racial tension and the “place” of blacks and white ethnics in American society. Likewise, the response and contribution of blacks and ethnics to progressive education has received little attention from scholars.

The San Francisco longshoreman-philosopher, Eric Hoffer, once wrote that, “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.” While Hoffer had something else in mind, I will use this epigram as an introduction to, and commentary upon, the fact that a large part of the universe of historical actors has been treated to a malign neglect. When Tamara Hareven refers to “anonymous Americans,” she does not equate the “anonymous” in American social historiography with the “inarticulate”; neither does she define a projected integrated and comprehensive history of social experience as “history from the bottom up”. Rather, she points out that all manners of peoples and ranges of human experience have escaped, or been excluded from, systematic historical inquiry. As an essential element in “raising consciousness,” in asserting their identity, numerous groups are now trying to “get their hands on history.”

John Dewey's intellectual career is a remarkable example of sustained involvement across three quarters of a century with the challenge of formulating a philosophy that would engage with the common life. To break into the continuities of his questions and answers is to risk some distortion. Even his last work—for example, his collaboration with Arthur Bentley—involved a reformulation and correction of earlier themes and a constant retrospection at the accumulation of his work. It is clear, nonetheless, that certain phases in his work exhibit particular preoccupations. By focussing, as I shall do here, on the decade that bounded the First World War it is possible to see in sharp relief some problematical aspects of Dewey's longstanding commitment to the definition of a philosophy of praxis.

Late in May, 1808, a quarter century before Hardy Ivy built his settler's cabin hereabouts, Simon Fraser and his North West Company voyageurs discovered the Quesnel River, a Fraser River tributary of central B.C., named after the explorer-clerk Jules Maurice Quesnel. But unlike Atlanta whose founding dates (Terminus, 1837, Marthasville, 1843, Atlanta, 1845) roughly parallel Quesnel's discovery, gold strike, and early settlement phases, the latter town is taking its time to grow—population, say, 6,000 as compared with Greater Atlanta's one and one half-million. Just the same, it enjoys a good school system, administered at the time of writing by an aggressive board and a persuasive superintendent.

Two historians, Clarence J. Karier and Walter Feinberg, recently have suggested that John Dewey's commitment to democracy was less than whole-hearted. This view rests in part on their use of a report submitted by Dewey to the Federal Government in 1918: “Conditions Among the Poles in the United States: Confidential Report.” As Karier puts it, the report reveals Dewey as a conservative who was “committed to flexible, experimentally managed, orderly social change, which included a high degree of manipulation.” A closer look at the report and its historical context, however, suggests precisely the opposite: Dewey is shown as strongly and personally committed to the democratic process and opposed to manipulative government. In addition, it is a revealing example of Dewey's efforts to connect his educational theories to more general social and political questions.

In the late eighteenth century are to be found the first beginnings of the to us so familiar division in American higher education between public and private institutions. Throughout most of the eighteenth century such distinction was unknown. Higher education and the preparatory Latin grammar schooling were viewed as intimately linked to the interests of state and church. This view applied to the three colleges existing in the first quarter of the century. Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale served as training centers for their provinces' political and professional leadership. They had been duly authorized and in part financially supported by their colonial legislatures. With the exception of Yale they were under the joint supervision and government of representatives of the colony's lay population and established church. These governmental arrangements reflected the Reformation concept of the unity of established secular and ecclesiastical government with the college, a concept which in turn rested on the assumed religious homogeneity of the province's population, Anglican in Virginia and Puritan in New England. It was precisely this assumption of a religiously homogeneous population which could no longer be upheld in the eighteenth century. As it was being swept away by the appearance of Baptists and Quakers, Lutherans and Dutch Reformed as well as by the migration of Puritans and Anglicans into all the colonies, it could no longer provide guidelines for college founding and governance. As a consequence in colonies with existing colleges—Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut—traditions of college governance came under fire, and the weakening alliance of state and church forced the colleges to redefine their own position. In colonies without an established church there emerged during the Great Awakening of the 1740s a more particularistic perspective on college education as serving local or group interests and being largely without either financial support or direct governmental control from public authorities. It was under these conditions, also, that the first attacks appeared against the concept of a provincial college as a monopoly. These attacks were beaten back in 1762 in Massachusetts and in 1770 in Rhode Island. But when Queen's College opened in 1766 in New Jersey, a competing college appeared for the first time in one of the colonies, and a new development was inaugurated which, half a century later, would lead to the proliferation of the “private” colleges of the antebellum era.

In 1875, women began leaving their homes and boarding schools to attend Smith College. They arrived from farms, barely settled western states, and from cities as large as New York and Chicago; but the largest number came from small New England towns. The fathers of some were artisans of even unemployed laborers, but more commonly they held positions of responsibility in business firms or in the professions. A few girls as young as fifteen came, as did a number of women in their twenties, but usually they began study at age seventeen or eighteen.

France acquired the world's second largest overseas empire during the nineteenth century. This achievement appears all the more remarkable when measured against the scant holdings retained at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the nation's weak industrial base, the banking community's marked preference for investment in the state debts of European and Mediterranean countries, the stagnant demographic pattern, and the mass of the population's distaste for imperialist adventures. Among those clamouring for the extension of imperial holdings could be found many military men and missionaries and a more restricted number of ideologues and politicians. But the strongest support for imperialism came from the business elites of the port cities and the centres of textile production. Despite their frequent invocations of grandeur and the mission civilisatrice, the motives of these bourgeois magnates remained essentially economic. They wanted the semi-colonial areas, as well as the colonies, to supply them with markets, raw materials and more profitable returns on investments. Local Chambers of Commerce, not unnaturally, became the pivotal institutions providing sustained support for imperialist endeavours. The provincial business communities discovered, however, that the realization of their economic dreams required more than economic activity. Most obviously, they had to deploy their substantial political influence in efforts to sway government policy. During the Third Republic, when France's empire reached its greatest extent, they also utilized the Chambers of Commerce to lend support to local geographical societies, colonialist organizations, colonial congresses, and endeavours in the field of imperial education. If these undertakings never completely realized the hopes of their backers, they still enjoyed successes substantial enough to call forth continued support.

By the end of his long, productive life John Dewey had become as familiar a part of the American scene as any man of ideas of the century. He reigned as aegis of progressive education, the final architect of Pragmatism—America's own philosophy—and the writer of so many books, articles, reviews and broadsides that it is hardly any wonder he has been so often mistaken for Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a library classification system!

The Harvard College student body, like the university as a whole, changed markedly in the ante-bellum era, but it changed less in size than in composition. Though the number of yearly graduates remained stable at about 60 from 1810 to 1850, the students came increasingly from Boston's “rich and fashionable families.” More precisely, they came from the new business and professional families who provided the funds for Harvard's rapid growth and came by degrees to control its governing bodies. The Harvard “experience” became an important part of the process of elite social, economic, and cultural consolidation in these years, and contributed to the cohesiveness, cultivation, and hauteur of the distinctive Brahmin upper class that was to flourish after the Civil War. Analysis of the way in which Harvard came to be monopolized by the Boston elite should throw light not only on the development of the class but also on the evolving educational network which formed a portion of its institutional underpinnings.

Historians of the nineteenth-century Muslim Mediterranean often experience difficulties when they attempt to integrate the study of social or administrative institutions within larger political or intellectual topics. An example of this phenomenon can be found in the history of the Khedivial Law School in Cairo, founded in 1873 and eventually attached to Fuad I University after World War I. The presence of a large number of lawyers within the first twentieth-century Egyptian nationalist movement and in the political life of Egypt up to the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1952 is a well-known fact. As a result, many authors have mentioned the Khedivial Law School, and have tended to give it an historical importance which separates—perhaps in an exaggerated fashion—the study of European law from other professions pursued by young educated Egyptians at the turn of the century, such as that of medicine or military science. When certain recent scholars analyse the components of Egyptian nationalist politics after 1907, therefore, they offer an image of the law school which goes beyond the general idea we actually possess of its internal development between the reigns of Khedive Ismail (1863–79) and Khedive Abbas I (1892–1914). Fortunately an examination of the European archives and the Arabic press of the period helps fill the most obvious gaps in the historical record. It also allows us to estimate the degree to which we can realistically suggest a connection between the teaching of European law and the emergence of a particularly Egyptian model of nationalist political expression in the twentieth-century Mediterranean Arab World.

John Dewey has been the subject of comment and criticism for over three-quarters of a century. Often, especially in recent writing on the history of education, the criticism has been divided between those who, to use Richard LaBreque's colorful language, see Dewey as the “good guy” and those who see him as the “bad guy.” Among the latter, sometimes collectively called “revisionists,” are Clarence Karier, Walter Feinberg, and Colin Greer. Charles Tesconi and Van Cleve Morris have recently co-authored a book emphasizing similar themes. Their attacks on Dewey and other liberals have centered around the rather vaguely defined issue of social control. As Michael Katz says in his discussion of twentieth century school reform in Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, “Nonetheless, there is a darker side to the social thought of even the best progressives, notably Dewey and Jane Addams, … Briefly, the emphasis on community in Jane Addams and the definitions of democracy and experience in Dewey provide particularly subtle and sophisticated instances the widespread attempt in their time to foster modes of social control appropriate to a complex urban environment.”