Opposition to school vaccination requirements has a long history in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to today. This essay identifies three distinct phases in organized resistance to school vaccination in the United States between 1827 and 1929. This resistance was associated with a rise in anti-science discourse among leaders of the national anti-vaccination societies and occurred within the context of broader social changes and scientific discoveries during this period.

Social historians have demonstrated that although men comprised the majority of teachers in North Carolina schools and academies during the early national period, women predominated by the end of the nineteenth century. This study concludes that among the music teachers who taught in academies and venture schools, women gained a majority decades earlier. In an effort to understand some of the underlying social processes that contributed to this shift, the following discussion analyzes the changing proportion of men and women in a sample of 65 music teachers, tracks the tuition they charged in a free market, and compares this to the tuition charged by teachers of Latin and Greek. The shift to women among music teachers in North Carolina presents an intriguing case, because it does not fit well with some earlier theoretical models of feminization among nineteenth-century teachers. The data suggest that women came to predominate among music teachers because a changing market for music instruction in venture schools and academies triggered a process of occupational abandonment and succession.

Before sunrise one spring morning in 1815, twenty-four-year-old Susan Davis Nye left her family's farm in Amenia, New York. “After a most affecting parting from my beloved brothers, sisters and friends, I kissed my little sleeping babes and before the sun shone upon my dear native hills, bade them farewell, perhaps forever!” Thus begins the first entry in her journal dated April 22nd, the day she undertook the initial leg of a long voyage south to teach in North Carolina.

The presence of academies in the United States spans roughly three centuries. Originating in the colonial era, academies spread across the country by mid-nineteenth century. Such institutions generally served students between the ages of eight and twenty-five, providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. According to one contemporary source, by 1850 more than 6,100 incorporated academies existed in the United States, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the nation's colleges. Nineteenth-century supporters portrayed academies as exemplars of the nation's commitment to enlightenment and learning; opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Those in favor of a large-scale system of public high schools dismissed academies as irrelevant and outmoded institutions. The culmination of this controversy is well known, because it is reiterated in every secondary text on the history of American education. As a widespread system of public higher schooling supplanted the academies in the twentieth century, private and independent schools dropped out of the mainstream of American educational discourse. The following essays seek to recover something of the long history of academies in the United States and to reconsider the historical significance of these institutions in society.

In his book, The Age of the Academies, Theodore R. Sizer argued that academies represented a significant break from the relatively narrow schooling that had been previously available to students in the early Latin grammar schools. In his view, the proliferation of academies heralded a new age in education, one more reflective of the Enlightenment values promoted by such Republican leaders as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Rush. After thirty-five years of additional scholarship on academies, does Sizer's thesis still stand? This essay investigates the range of educational institutions that provided some form of advanced schooling to Americans just preceding and concurrent with the founding of the earliest academies. It examines the differences and similarities among a number of northern and southern early nineteenth-century schools in order to address the following question: to what extent did schools calling themselves academies represent a distinctly new turn in the history of American education? By clarifying the relations between the various types of institutions during the post-colonial period, I conclude that the historical significance of the early academy movement is broader than the intellectual or curricular reform discussed by Sizer.

In 1864, the British government established the Taunton Commission to conduct an inquiry into the education of middle-class boys. Concerned about the status of the arts and sciences in the schools, the Commission directed its appointed inspectors to pay particular attention to scientific subjects. Almost as an afterthought, the Commission decided to investigate the conditions in girls' schools as well. From 1864 to 1868, inspectors traveled throughout Great Britain, observing classes, interviewing headmasters and headmistresses, and examining students in private, proprietary, and endowed schools. To their surprise, members of the Taunton Commission discovered that while the sciences maintained at best a marginal toehold in boys' schools, they were quite popular in girls' schools. While a boy's education centered around Latin and Greek, a girl's education included ample doses of botany, chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, and physiology.