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The Congregationalists and American Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

James Findlay*
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island

Extract

The Congregational Library, located in downtown Boston, possesses an important collection of papers related to the history of American education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which deserves the attention of historians. The Library has long served as a principal repository for the historical records of American Congregationalists, well known for their broad support of education. In 1965, as a result of the earlier merger of Congregational-Christian and Evangelical Reformed churches into the United Church of Christ, the files of the Congregational Board of Homeland Missions were deposited at the denominational library in Boston. These materials included the manuscript records of all the national educational societies of the denomination.

Type
Research Note
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Nordquist, Corrine, “Report of the Library Committee to Directors of the American Congregational Association,” September 20, 1965, mimeographed paper, Congregational Library, Boston.Google Scholar

2. A more detailed description of the collection is in Naylor, Natalie, “Raising a Learned Ministry: American Education Society, 1815–1860,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971), pp. 395396.Google Scholar

3. Important printed supplements to the correspondence of the SPCTEW are the Annual Reports of the organization. Baldwin carefully prepared these reports, for publicity purposes as well for the membership. The reports are packed with information and often contain important indications of Baldwin's thinking about key issues relating to religion and higher education. The Congregational Library possesses a complete file of these Reports as well as similar documents for all of the other organizations being considered here.Google Scholar

4. See Pearson, Samuel C. Jr., “From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the 19th Century,” Church History, 38 (March, 1969): 6784, for further elaboration of this theme.Google Scholar

5. Powers, Edward A., “American Congregationalism and Education,” in “Report of a Consultation on Education,” mimeographed copy, Congregational Library, p. 24; First Annual Report of the New West Education Commission (Chicago, 1881).Google Scholar

6. Naylor, , “Raising a Learned Ministry,” p. 398, notes that “there is no satisfactory study of the Presbyterian education societies.” Google Scholar

7. Naylor, , “Raising a Learned Ministry”; Allmendinger, David, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in New England, 1760–1860 (New York, 1974); Findlay, James, “The SPCTEW and Western Colleges: Religion and Education in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” History of Education Quarterly, 17 (Spring, 1977): 31–62. Travis Hedrick in “Julian Monsen Sturtevant and the Moral Machinery of Society: the New England Struggle Against Pluralism in the Old Northwest, 1829–1877,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1974), was the first person to explore tentatively the papers of the SPCTEW and to suggest their potential for educational history.Google Scholar