Most historians have a favorite time and place that we believe is truly central to understanding the past, a time and place that illuminates an era or sets the conditions of the future. For many years, that time and place for me has been late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chicago.

In 1923 John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board embarked on a project to reform the public schools in two rural Indiana counties and thereby to demonstrate to Hoosiers and other midwesterners the necessity and wisdom of fundamental change in rural education. The GEB demonstration project in Johnson and LaGrange counties developed from more than two decades of wide concern and voluminous writing about America's rural problems, particularly as they applied to schools. The Indiana project thus drew not only on Rockefeller money but on the best efforts of professional experts to define and solve the rural school problem.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century the ascendent star of science was closely tied to the rise of the middle class. Science reflected their optimism and aided them in understanding a world and society in constant motion. The middle class embraced science in a hearty manner and as a labor of love they sought to popularize it in America. By the turn of the century, the middle class enthusiasm for popularization had abated somewhat, but science was still being pursued and popularized with great ardor by others. Only now the group most enamored of science, and certain that its rise was tied to the prestige and power of science, was the socialist movement, the self-appointed sentinel of the working class. No less than the middle class, the socialist intellectuals sought to ground their discourse in scientific language and to make the fruits of science readily available to a wide audience. The great revolutions in science—the Copernican, Newtonian, and Darwinian—became the subject matter for socialist popularizers of science. Their tale was simple: Marxism was a science, a scientific revolution in social thought, that would usher in not only a new world-view, but a new society, a new age.