The National Education Association (NEA) has not been a topic of choice for many educational historians. Perhaps a major reason for this it that the NEA as a site for historical work seems fraught with pitfalls. Consider first the problem of the NEA as a setting for an institutional history. The major example of this kind of work yielded a decidedly unsatisfactory result. Edgar B. Wesley's centennial history of the NEA, published in 1957, is an almost completely uncritical description and an unabashed celebration of the organization.

Spring Hill College is Alabama's oldest institution of higher learning, one year older than the University of Alabama. Founded in 1830 by Michael Portier, the Catholic bishop of Mobile, it has been run by the Jesuits since 1847. When it desegregated in September, 1954, the four-year liberal arts college claimed 1,000 students, including its evening division in downtown Mobile. The desegregation of Spring Hill College (SHC) came just before the increased Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and White Citizens Council activity which led the backlash to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Although volumes have been written about resistance to desegregation in the Deep South, almost no published research exists on the peaceful desegregation of white southern colleges, which anticipated and complied with Supreme Court rulings. This essay will place SHC's unique story in the context of the desegregation of higher education in the South and of race relations in Mobile, Alabama, in the decade before massive resistance. It will examine models for desegregation of Catholic colleges before the Brown decision and, finally, will detail SHC's desegregation as a gradual process that occurred between 1948 and 1954.

In the spring of 1957, journalist Sidney Katz wrote a story for Maclean's Magazine entitled “The Lost Children of British Columbia” which detailed the disturbing events leading up to the forcible removal of 100 Doukhobor children from their New Denver homes by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers. The children, all between the ages of seven and fourteen, were taken to the New Denver Dormitory, located approximately 260 miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, where they remained until they reached the age of fifteen. They were not permitted to speak their native Russian, visit home (although parents were allowed brief, supervised visits to the dormitory), take holidays, or visit friends and relatives in the nearby town of New Denver.

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.

Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested to her that a “triumph of reason over the passions” might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, “I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings. … In this I can make no distinction of sex” [italics in original]. Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that males and females were both rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs.

Academies and academy students increased substantially in number during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Why? Who were these students and what did academy attendance mean to them? Theodore R. Sizer asked these questions in 1964, but his ability to answer them was limited by the absence of studies that focused on academy students. In this essay I reexamine Sizer's understanding of academies in light of evidence provided by subsequent studies of student populations. These studies include my own comparative analysis of data from nearly 500 Regents academies that operated in New York State between 1835 and 1890, as well as in-depth case studies of individual institutions by myself and others.

Dignified brick and cobblestone former academies, restored as boutiques, museums, and houses, lend a romantic touch to many small towns and villages of the northern states. Seeming relics of a quaint educational past, these actually are monuments to a ubiquitous institution of nineteenth-century northern American communities, one that has slipped to the margins of public memory and inspired few histories. Historians most comfortably write about the antecedents and evolution of existing institutions. Those not leaving trails to the present pose evidentiary and conceptual problems. Just finding a word to label an institution that crosses modern categories of primary, secondary, and higher education is difficult.