In 1828, as the movement to improve educational opportunities for American women was gaining in prominence, Catharine Beecher approached first Mary Lyon, and a year later Lyon's associate Zilpah Grant, to join her as instructor at Hartford Female Seminary. Consonant with the era of optimistic reform in which she lived, Beecher believed Hartford could change the world, so she wanted the most well-known female educators on board. The key to Hartford's influence was to be the type of students it attracted. Beecher wrote to Grant that a “woman of piety and active benevolence, with wealth which enables her to take the lead in society, can do more good than another of equally exalted character without it.” Lyon and Grant both declined.

During the decades around the beginning of the twentieth century, public universities in the United States commonly employed a “certificate system” to establish eligibility for undergraduate admittance. “Certification” meant that between 1877 and 1931 representatives of the University of Wisconsin inspected high schools and had face-to-face interaction with pupils, teachers, and administrators. If they found a school's facilities, curriculum, and teaching to be satisfactory, graduates—with the endorsement of their principal—could enter the University as freshmen without further examination. This process of certification by inspection was part of a broader dialogue between Wisconsin high schools and the state university. The principal inspector during the 1920s, Thomas Lloyd-Jones, brought together strands of both administrative and pedagogical Progressivism, while insisting on the importance of academic subjects in the high school curriculum. By encouraging closer articulation between secondary schools and colleges, it was a central component of what educational historian Mark VanOverbeke has described as a more “stratified and standardized educational system” that developed in the United States between 1870 and 1910.

On a cool, crisp winter afternoon in a California desert, at the foot of the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered. Some were curious; more were angry. Before all of them, standing on an oil tank with a microphone and loudspeaker, forty-seven-year-old Joseph Y. Kurihara shouted angry words of defiance. Referring to the generally despised Fred Tayama, who was assaulted the night before, Kurihara bellowed, “Why permit that sneak to pollute the air we breathe? … Let's kill him and feed him to the roving coyotes! … If the Administration refuses to listen to our demand, let us proceed with him and exterminate all other informers in this camp.”

This essay is an attempt at an institutional history of the History of Education Society (HES), from its inception in 1960 to the present day. As an institutional history, a genre with which I am generally, and not altogether favorably associated, it is not an intellectual history. Thus, many of the intellectual currents and cross-currents, as well as the History of Education Quarterly (HEQ), the journal of the HES in which these intellectual movements were featured, are slighted in this presentation. I deal extensively with one intellectual movement within the field, the Bernard Bailyn-Lawrence Cremin critique of the field as too institutional and intellectually narrow, because it was so intimately involved with the creation of the HES, and the attendant de-emphasis, if not rejection, of the institutional history of education that was dominant in the pre-HES history of education organization. I hope that what follows will be interesting enough to my listeners and readers to explain to them the reasons for my choices.

In 1787, a group of American refugee settlers in the western portion of Quebec, which would become the colony of Upper Canada in 1791, collectively petitioned the Governor General, Lord Dorchester, for schools. They insisted, in fact, on a relatively comprehensive network of schools funded directly through the government purse. Dorchester responded by appointing William Smith, the former Chief Justice of New York State with whom he had formed a political friendship during the American War of Independence, to head a special committee to report on the state of education throughout the entire province. Several hundred copies of the report were printed and released in 1789. The report recommended a government-supported tripartite elementary, secondary, and university school system. The recommendations were not acted upon, but the report's ideas lingered in public discourse for years to come. In the writing of the origins of schooling in Upper Canada, this report has not received considerable attention. Moreover, the intentions and goals of these early settlers advocating for government-aided schooling are characteristically overlooked. In the dominant view, the building of Upper Canada's school system was motivated by the bureaucratization and institutionalization concerns of major school advocates and politicians in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the fall semester of 1894, Ida Mae Godfrey entered Iowa Wesleyan College (IWC), a small predominantly white coeducational institution in the southeast Iowa town of Mount Pleasant Godfrey, like dozens of whites and eight blacks before her, had graduated from Mount Pleasant High School and was soon faced with a decision concerning the next steps in her life. She could, as did many young black and white women, marry, settle, and raise a family, but her personal and professional aspirations likely convinced her that a college education was the best choice. Although enrolled at IWC, Godfrey most likely lived at home while she attended school. This allowed her parents and extended family to shield her from some of the racial prejudices and possible sexual abuses she may have experienced had she gone away to college and worked as a domestic in a white home to pay for school. In temporarily exerting control over their daughter's life, Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey helped to preserve Ida's mental and physical energies so that she might advance through school and enter one of the most respectable occupations open to black women in the late nineteenth century—teaching.

In the fall of 2001, with posters, tote bags, speakers, and balloons, the University of Pennsylvania launched its celebration of “125 Years of Women at Penn.” Exhibits illustrating the experiences of women students appeared around campus and on the Web, while banners trumpeting the contributions of Penn women waved from lightposts. On the first weekend in November, the University dedicated a four-foot seal marking the “Women's Walkway” in the center of campus and praised the tens of thousands of women who helped shape the University into what it is today. The festive anniversary, more than two years in the making, celebrated, in the words of University Trustee Judith Berkowitz, “the foresight of a great university to take in women when others did not.” The legacy of women at Penn was important to remember, Berkowitz added, because “it's very empowering to know your history.”

In 1827, two years after its incorporation as a college and six years removed from its founding as a “collegiate institution,” Amherst College revamped its curriculum into what it called a “parallel course of study.” In this new scheme, students were allowed to follow one of two tracks during their college years. Courses in mathematics, geography, logic, rhetoric, the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were still required of all students, but they were permitted to substitute a variety of new offerings in place of instruction in ancient languages and literature—choices ranging from French or Spanish to drawing or civil engineering. The faculty of the college were clear in their rationale for such a change: echoing the sentiments of the nation's President John Quincy Adams, they argued that theirs was “emphatically an Age of Improvement,” one which necessitated altering the structure of the college course. They warned that if the college did not reform its course offerings it would witness the rise of new institutions better equipped to provide for the needs of young men, threatening the existence of Amherst and other colleges committed to liberal education. “Let our Colleges promptly lead on in the mighty march of improvement,” they stated, “and all will be well; but let them hesitate and linger a little longer, and many of their most efficient friends will go on without them.”

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those of the eight public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908: Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) (1891), Alabama College for Women (ACW) (1893), Texas State College for Women (TSCW) (1901), Florida State College for Women (FSCW) (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908). Little studied today, these schools served as important centers of women's education in their states, collectively educating approximately 100,000 women before World War II and with combined enrollments exceeding that of the Seven Sisters schools for many years.

No introductions were necessary. By the time of this meeting on May 2, 1972, all of the educators around the table had worked together in the tightly knit community of Protestant fundamentalist education for decades. Those close relationships, however, only made the meeting's confrontational agenda all the more awkward and tense. Beka Horton read the charges. Horton, with her husband Arlin, had founded a thriving fundamentalist school in Pensacola, Florida. The Hortons had invited Dayton Hobbs for support. Hobbs was, like the Hortons, a graduate of fundamentalist Bob Jones University (BJU) and founder of a fundamentalist school in Florida. The Hortons accused Walter Fremont and Phil Smith, leaders of the education faculty at BJU, of one of the most devastating charges in the world of fundamentalist education. They had called this meeting with Bob Jones III, current leader of BJU and grandson of the founder, in order to apprise him of their suspicions that Fremont and Smith had become progressive educators.

Margaret Gillum was distressed. Her sophomore English students in Terre Haute, IN were making “sneering remarks” about “dirty foreigners,” even though she implored them to use language that reflected the principles of “brotherhood” and “true neighborliness.” Pressed into action by the catastrophic world war unfolding around her, Gillum decided to teach her students to be more tolerant of human diversity. Describing her successful lesson to colleagues in a popular teaching journal in 1941, Gillum explained, “There are in my city a number of racial groups gathered into neighborhoods, as one finds them everywhere: Syrians, Italians, French, and a large number of Germans and Jews, as well as three distinct communities of Negroes drifted up from the South.” Hoping to foster empathy for the “racial groups” in her community, Gillum initiated her lesson by asking students to list familiar racial epithets. Her students responded enthusiastically and as Gillum called out the names of different “races” her students shouted back their answers:

And what do we call Italians—Dagoes!
And the Germans?—Dutchmen!
The Irish?—Oh, Pat or Mike!

Within a large city… it would be most unwise to attempt to say what is the correct curriculum or organization of all the high schools under the management of the city school board… I am convinced American secondary education can be made satisfactory without any radical changes in the basic pattern. This can only be done, however, if the citizens in many localities display sufficient interest in their schools and are willing to support them. The improvement must come school by school and be made with due regard for the nature of the community (Dr. James Conant, The American High School Today, 1959).

Educational opportunity must be equal for all young people, regardless of the neighborhood they live in and the school they attend (Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre, Principal, William Penn High School for Girls, 1961).

In August 1945, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers. From September 1945 to April 1952, the United States–the most dominant power among the victorious nations–occupied the defeated country.

This article contributes to our historical understanding of student experience in general, and more particularly, to our understanding of developing cross-group relationships within desegregated schools over the second half of the twentieth century. The article draws from a broader study that examines students' evolving relationships within a matrix of intersecting identities in a Baltimore County comprehensive high school in Maryland between 1950 and 2000. The focus in this article is on Miller High students of the 1950s and 1960s during the early years of desegregation. Relationships remembered by graduates bring to light the hierarchical structure that distinguished white students along class and gender lines within an academically tracked system and the limitations and possibilities afforded African-American youth across class and gender as they encountered Miller High established norms for the first time in 1956 when the school desegregated.