The title of this essay, as fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will recognize, comes from the Sherlock Holmes mystery entitled “Silver Blaze.” In that story, a prize race horse disappears shortly before an important race and its trainer is subsequently found bludgeoned to death out on the moor. The most important clue, for Holmes, is the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When Dr. Watson, in his inimitable way, tells Holmes that the dog guarding the stables did nothing, Holmes proudly asserts, “That was the curious incident.” That the dog did not bark proves that the theft was an inside job by the trainer himself, who, having placed a large bet on an opposing horse, took Silver Blaze out on the moor in order to hobble him partially. Holmes concludes that the trainer was kicked to death by the stallion and finds the “murderer” safe at a neighboring farm with his blaze painted over.

In the Netherlands the first girl admitted to a qualifying secondary education and the first female university student were sisters, Frederika and Aletta Jacobs. These girls, twelve- and seventeen-years old, entered the respective institutions in 1871 after the father and Aletta had made successful requests. In each case the admission brought an end to a long-standing male privilege. And in each case contemporaries conceived of these ambitious girls as exceptional and therefore raised hardly any objections. In reality however, the arrival of the Jacobs sisters initiated what amounted to a revolution in girls' education, as Dutch girls and women began to follow their examples in unexpected numbers.

Today eight Schools of Arts and Crafts are the largest source of engineers in France but they originated from a single school established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. At the time many French were concerned that their industries lagged behind the British. What better way to modernize industry than to train boys and young men in a more rational approach to production and send them out to lead industrial change? Historians have left a pessimistic view of the school's first quarter century, but my reading of the evidence, including the archives on school shops and commerce, has led me to nearly the opposite conclusion—the school of Châlons was, from 1807 to 1830, one of the most innovative and unusual schools of all time.

As the political conflict over slavery's fate in the West intensified through the summer of 1849, Peter M. Wallace, editor of the Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, vowed that he was “utterly opposed now and forever to all political compromises” on the issue of slavery. Significantly, Wallace connected the success of such southern resistance to the improvement of South Carolina's free schools. The Carolina Spartan's columns, the editor explained, “will be open to the advocates of a more liberal but judicious appropriation of the public money” for common schooling because “an educated and intelligent people, cannot be enslaved.” Wallace was one of many antebellum Spartanburg leaders who linked schooling with southern nationalism and used slavery as a metaphor for dependence on northern institutions. In the process, these men espoused what historians often view as a very un-southern idea—liberal government support for public education—and contrasted it with an image central to the definition of southern white republicanism—the ignorant slave.