The time has come to take stock of the 1960s on college campuses, to examine the decade, and to assess its impact. As the offspring of undergraduates of the 1960s themselves now enter college, they remind us that what was once the immediate present has receded into history. My own concerns as a historian lead me to focus on the impact of the events and processes of the 1960s on student cultures. The 1960s profoundly reshaped undergraduate worlds. Because the unnaturally calm campus of the 1970s and early 1980s was the paradoxical outcome of that turbulent decade, we are still living within its ironic consequences.

James Bryce observed in 1888 that “he who would understand the changes [in] the American democracy will find far more instruction in a study of the State governments than of the Federal Constitution.” So neglected was the subject, he found, that it could not even be called a field: “it is rather a primeval forest, where the vegetation is rank, and through which scarcely a trail has yet been cut.” Although Bryce himself cut one such path in The American Commonwealth, much of the terrain of state government in the nineteenth century remains unexplored to this day.

In May 1985 the Canadian Historical Association gave over a major part of its meeting to the history of education. Joint sessions were sponsored by CHA, educational history groups, and those primarily interested in the history of the family or childhood. This program culminated fifteen years of intensive research into educational history on both sides of the Atlantic. Although there have been comparative histories of education and historiographical articles concerning the history of education in one or another country, there have been few attempts to compare historiographical trends of several countries. This article will compare trends in English, Canadian, and French historiography, which offer a stark contrast, and it will allude to trends concerning the United States, Europe generally, and Quebec within the framework of comparative historiography.