In March 1904, at a time when the Prussian Ministry of Education was giving serious consideration to the admission of women to institutions of higher education, it received a petition signed by the rectors of eight of Prussia's nine universities. The rectors expressed strong opposition to the introduction of coeducation and called instead for the creation of a separate university for women, where they suggested that professorial appointments would “be open to the best scholarly talents among the women.” To support this viewpoint, they noted that in the United States, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr colleges employed 249 women as professors, versus just 88 men.

What follows will be a historical account of somewhat unfamiliar events and people. The aim is less to recall a nearly forgotten episode than to suggest its ironic complement to the current effort to raise standards in the teaching and learning of history. Typical for the discipline, the narrative draws upon the research of others, and several scholars have helped prepare the conceptual ground. Of the latter, four will be cited briefly by way of an introduction: John Dewey and the most recent presidents of the History of Education Society.

Pennsylvania's statehouse, the journalist surmised, had “never witnessed such a sight.” Neither had he. Gazing across the galleries, he was astounded to find them packed—with women. Women! Women crowding the benches, women standing in doorways, and women “clustered in bunches of color in the narrow little aisles”—all awaiting news of Pennsylvania's “scientific temperance” bill, which faced a final vote that afternoon. The bill would require all state public schools to provide instruction in “the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics.” Additionally, all new teachers would be required to pass an examination in the subject, which would have to be taught “as thoroughly as other required branches”—and schools that failed to comply with the legislation risked the loss of state education funds.

Histories of education in the United States have often focused upon the role of nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization in accelerating educational innovation. In keeping with this trend, historians of the kindergarten have attributed the success of this institution to several factors. The kindergarten, based on the pedagogy of the German educator Friedrich Froebel, was first introduced in the United States from Germany in 1860 and by 1914 was entrenched in most American urban public school systems. By then, over nine hundred cities operated nearly 6,500 kindergarten classes with an enrollment of 312,000 children. In accounting for this movement's rapid success, some historians have emphasized the role of kindergartens in assimilating the immigrants that poured into American cities after the Civil War. Others have argued persuasively that the kindergarten's emphasis on “the Child, the Home, Family, and Motherhood,” as well as faith in the perfectibility of children, meshed nicely with nineteenth-century evangelical concerns over the conflict between private and public spheres, and therefore found an enthusiastic following among female reformers, philanthropists, and educators.

In speaking of the settlement of America, Lawrence Cremin observed that “it is [the] fact of empire that holds the key to the dynamics of early American education.” This was as true of French colonial efforts in the New World as it was for those of the English, though French colonial motivation was tempered by the vague notion of “for the glory of the King,” which revolved around defensive military needs while giving lesser consideration to economic imperialism. And with the French, as for the English, education played a significant and necessary role in colonial policy which attempted to achieve social and cultural dominance. Within a scant decade of the establishment of New Orleans as a permanent settlement in the Louisiana Territory in 1718, provisions were made for the education of the females of the area—white and minority. While meager efforts had been made to provide education for the male youth, those efforts were not well received by the small local population and ultimately were short lived. Consequently, the first lasting element of institutionalized education in French colonial Louisiana, the Ursuline school and convent, put a unique emphasis on female and minority education. How this unusual development merged with, and reflected, colonial political goals is the central concern of this essay.

When Lucy Goodale, Mount Holyoke Seminary Class of 1841, wrote home to her parents, she called the seminary her “castle of science.” She could not have known how apt that phrase would become in the next hundred years; she knew only that the chemistry course she was taking, part of a seven-science sequence, was full of “miracles.” Nonetheless, Lucy Goodale's “castle” would become a citadel for women in science; a college that would produce more women who went on for doctorates in the physical sciences from 1910 to 1969, more women who obtained doctorates in chemistry from 1920 to 1980, and more women listed in the 1938 American Men of Science than any other undergraduate institution. Additionally, during the years 1927—41, it would be twice as productive in publishing chemical research as any other liberal arts college (coeducational or single-sex) in the country. Besides exploring how Mount Holyoke Seminary, later Mount Holyoke College, achieved this remarkable record, this paper also examines M. Elizabeth Tidball's hypothesis, that the higher the ratio of women of accomplishment present in a college environment, the more likely the college is to produce women graduates who proceed to postcollege accomplishment themselves, particularly in nontraditional fields like the sciences. Additionally, we demonstrate the attempts at what is today referred to as “networking” that began early in Mount Holyoke's history and continued into the present century. Differences between the generations of women scientists at the college will also be explored.

The traditional view of antebellum colleges, as exemplified by the works of Richard Hofstadter and others, depicts them as dogmatic, elitist, inflexible, and hostile both to science and to more practically oriented subjects, such as engineering. Only in recent decades have scholars disputed this view. Stanley Guralnick in 1975 challenged the contention that antebellum colleges were antagonistic to science, demonstrating that they made extraordinary and successful efforts to modify their curricula and add faculty to increase science offerings. Shortly after, in 1982, Colin Burke published a broadly based, quantitative study of antebellum colleges which revealed that they were far more successful, accessible, adaptable, and progressive than previously recognized.

The state constitutional convention of 1879 significantly changed the status of California's land-grant university. Throughout the 1870s, farmers and labor groups accused the university's Board of Regents with mismanagement of federal land grants, corruption, and a failure to establish agriculture, mining, and mechanical arts programs as outlined in the federal Morrill Act and statutory provisions within the state's 1868 Organic Act. During a tumultuous decade in California history, many saw the new University of California as serving the interests of the upper classes, focusing on classical “gentlemanly training” and replicating the Yankee private institutions of the East. The detractors of the university demanded that, as an instrument of social and economic development, the university primarily serve the training and research needs of agriculture and industry, the stated “leading objective” of the institution under statutory law.

The teacher rightly holds a prominent place in the educational, political, and social history of Canada. During the nineteenth century, provincial politicians, town councils, school administrators, and parents worried about what kind of people would make up the growing cadre of public school teachers and whether there would be enough of them to staff burgeoning schools. As for the spread of schools, few doubt that the establishment of universal public schooling was one of modern history's major social changes. Not only did schooling expand and illiteracy turn from the social norm into a social disability within a century but learning itself was transformed from an informal process, conducted in the home or as part of everyday activity, into a formal institutional setting which occurred outside the home and became the main occupation of childhood. Teaching changed from an itinerant, entrepreneurial, part-time activity to a spatially confined, hired, primary activity with a guaranteed income. Public schooling with hiring, certification, and a common curriculum necessitated a new relation between teacher and state. The teacher was a government employee who could aspire to a place in the bureaucratic hierarchy but who would also claim independent professional status, establishing associations to regulate that status and also mediate with the employer (the government) about wages, working conditions, and professional standing. Expansion of schooling, at first horizontally, bringing more and more children into school, and then vertically, extending years of schooling, meant that teaching was a growth industry offering secure, respectable employment and social mobility for educated sons and daughters of lower-middle status. It offered young women a way station between school and marriage or a respectable career for unmarried women.

Contemporaries saw the educational legislation of Tsar Alexander I (1801–25) as a sign that the new emperor intended to raise the cultural and material well-being of his countrymen. The establishment in 1802 of a ministry of public education and the division of the country into six great educational districts to administer a network of schools—elementary, intermediate, secondary, and university—extended the initial reforms of Catherine II (1762–96). Her grandson Alexander employed some of her advisers and looked to other reformers, who shared the two monarchs' interest in the intellectual fashions of the Enlightenment. Russian educators, who reflected the ideals of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their followers, saw public education as a means whereby advanced European thought would contribute to native virtues and lead to national progress. If the creation of schools did not match the publicity for public education, there was at least no doubt that the government encouraged the formation of an educated population. However, that mood changed after the Napoleonic wars when, in fear of revolution, educational authorities saw the school system primarily as a means for inculcating obedience and Christian pietism. Obscurantism decimated the staffs of universities and darkened schools on every level.

Even before the Reichstag defeated the renewal of the law banning the Social Democratic party in January 1890, Emperor William II was ready to discard Bismarck's policy of repression and to use pedagogy as a weapon against socialism. In an order sent to the Prussian State Ministry on 1 May 1889, the king of Prussia and German emperor demanded that the schools make a greater effort to refute socialist theories and to impart to the pupils a “healthy” view of society and the state. He proposed that the instruction of history cover more closely the modern era and especially the social policies of the Hohenzollern dynasty, from the abolition of serfdom to the sickness and old age insurance legislation of the 1880s, “in order to show that the rulers of Prussia have always considered it their duty to improve the living conditions of the laboring classes” and that “in the future workers can expect justice and security only under the protection and care of the king at the head of the state.” The emperor wanted the teachers to describe the menace of revolutionary socialism in such dark colors that the pupils would be “filled with revulsion and fear.”

The Hawaiian Chiefs' Children's School was founded in June 1839 when Hawai‘i's Congregational missionaries, gathered in the dusty port town of Honolulu for their annual General Meeting, received a letter from Hawai‘i's high chiefs asking them to establish a school exclusively for their children, the royal children. The chiefs' proposal was discussed at length by the assembled missionaries. Some expressed concern about devoting limited missionary resources to so few children. Others did not think the chiefs' children should be singled out for special treatment. In the end, however, these reservations were overcome, and the mission voted to accept the chiefs' request.

This article seeks to give a brief response to the question, how do historians know when they know something? The question involves ideas about certitude and truth, and most historians today would make very modest claims about certitude or truth in our statements about the past. Many would echo Charles Beard, who said sixty years ago, “We hold a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.” Today the historical profession is fragmented, ideologically diverse, and somewhat relativistic, a situation that is applauded by some and bemoaned by others.