Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T13:08:42.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Saints, Sinners, and People: A Position Paper on the Historiography of American Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Geraldine Joncich Clifford
Geraldine Joncich Clifford*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.”

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1975 , pp. 257 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. The True Believer (New York, 1951), p. 23.Google Scholar

2. Hareven, Tamara K. (ed.), Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-Century Social History (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1971), p. vii.Google Scholar

3. Autobiography. Rev. Moses Waddel Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Letterbook.Google Scholar

4. Petition for School District No. 5, April 1, 1843, in Dane County Superintendent of Schools: School Commissioners' Records, 1840–1845. Dane County Records, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.Google Scholar

5. “Record of the Sunday School Society in New Boston, Established April 24, 1825” and Memorandum of John Dalton, October 25, 1829—both in Edward Eagle Brown MSS, Newberry Library, Chicago.Google Scholar

6. Newcomb, Henry to Newcomb, Simon, April 15, 1860. Simon Newcomb Papers, Library of Congress, Box 4.Google Scholar

7. Shatraw, Milton E., “School Days,” American West, 3 (Spring 1966): 68–71.Google Scholar

8. Katz, Michael B. (ed.), Education in American History (New York, 1973), p. 37.Google Scholar

9. “Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction,” Teachers College Record, 73 (December 1971): 179.Google Scholar

10. Sloan, Douglas, “Historiography and the History of Education,” Review of Research in Education (Itasca, Ill., 1973), Vol. 1, p. 260.Google Scholar

11. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals, 1849.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Gracey, Harry L., Curriculum or Craftsmanship: Elementary School Teachers in a Bureaucratic System (Chicago, 1972) and Lortie, Dan C., Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago, 1975).Google Scholar

13. Loretto, Vincent, The Freedom of Teachers to Engage in Political Activity (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

14. Reissued by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. in 1965.Google Scholar

15. Elsbree, Willard S., The American Teacher: Evolution of a Profession in a Democracy (New York, 1939; Westport, Conn., 1970), p. v.Google Scholar

16. Swint, Henry Lee, The Northern Teacher in the South, 1862–1870 (Nashville, Tenn., 1941).Google Scholar

17. Finkelstein, Barbara Joan, “Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in American Primary Schools, 1820–1880, A Documentary History.” Unpublished Doctor of Education Dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1970, p. 5.Google Scholar

18. McLaren Sawyer, R., “No Teacher for the School: The Nebraska Junior Normal School Movement,” Nebraska History, 52 (Summer 1971): 191–203.Google Scholar

19. Sloan, , loc. cit. Google Scholar

20. Finkelstein, , loc. cit. Google Scholar

21. Gettleman, Marvin E., “John Finley's Illinois Education,” Journal of the State Historical Society of Illinois, XLII (Summer 1969): 147–169.Google Scholar

22. Historians of American higher education have neglected the professoriate as well. Except for Lawrence Veysey's The Emergence of the American University Chicago, 1965), the role of the faculty in the evolution and operation of the institution has escaped serious analysis, as has the meaning of the professorial life. See Content, Robin, “The Emergence of the American Professor,” History of Education Quarterly, XIV (Fall 1974): 430.Google Scholar

23. Button, Henry Warren, “James Park Slade—Nineteenth-Century Schoolman,” Journal of the State Historical Society of Illinois, LIV (1961): 374–391; Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). Both Button and Tyack have been, it must be noted, consistently more interested in the teacher as person than is the typical historian writing.Google Scholar

24. Brumbaugh, Martin G., The Life and Works of Christopher Dock, America's Pioneer Writer on Education (Philadelphia, 1908; New York, 1971), p. 3.Google Scholar

25. Park, Joe (ed.), The Rise of American Education, An Annotated Bibliography (Evanston, Ill., 1965).Google Scholar

26. Lazerson, Marvin, “Revisionism and American Educational History,” Harvard Educational Review, 43 (May 1973): 281.Google Scholar

27. Larson, Emil Leonard, One-Room and Consolidated Schools of Connecticut: A Comparative Study of Teachers, Costs and Holding Power, Teachers College Contributions to Education, No. 182 (New York, 1925), pp. 46, 47.Google Scholar

28. Alcott, William A., Confessions of a School Master (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 150–151.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 152.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 153; Currie, Martha B., “A Teacher and Her Students: My Mother, Ellen Peck, and Her One-room Schoolhouse in East Montpelier,” Vermont History, 39 (Winter 1971): 57 Google Scholar

31. Sneller, Anne Gertrude, A Vanished World (Syracuse, N. Y., 1964), p. 12. Sarah Moulton was the author's mother.Google Scholar

32. Waddell Papers.Google Scholar

33. Currie, , pp. 56–57.Google Scholar

34. Katz, Michael B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Myth of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971); Schultz, Stanley, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York, 1973); Kaestle, Carl F., The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Ravitch, Diane, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (New York, 1974); Lazerson, Marvin, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).Google Scholar

35. Goffman, Erving, Asylums (Chicago, 1961).Google Scholar

36. Silberman, Charles E., Crisis in the Classroom (New York, 1970), p. 141.Google Scholar

37. Myrtilla Miner MSS, Library of Congress.Google Scholar

38. Harveson, Mae Elizabeth, Catherine Esther Beecher: Pioneer Educator (Philadelphia, 1932) and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catherine Beecher (New Haven, Conn., 1973).Google Scholar

39. McGregor, Georgette, “The Educational Career of Susan Miller Dorsey,” History of Education Journal, 5 (Autumn 1953): 15–17.Google Scholar

40. Jorgenson, Lloyd P., The Founding of Public Education in Wisconsin (Madison, Wisconsin, 1956), p. 155.Google Scholar

41. Cash, Wilbur J., The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), pp. 140–141.Google Scholar

42. Potter, David M., “American Women and the American Character,” Stetson University Bulletin, LXII (January 1962): 1–22.Google Scholar

43. Lazerson, , p. 274; Katz, Michael B., Review of “Roots of Crisis,” Harvard Educational Review, 43 (August 1973): 438.Google Scholar

44. Catton, Bruce, A Stillness at Appomatox(Garden City, N. Y., 1953).Google Scholar

45. Appleton, James Diaries, Blackshear, microfilm copy in Special Collections Department, Robert, W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta.Google Scholar