A growing body of literature is calling for the historical study of educational experiences outside of the realm of the established school system. Lawrence Cremin has recommended that educational historians move beyond the traditional analysis of schools and colleges. In Traditions of American Education, he broadly defines education “as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, values, skills, or sensibilities, as well as any outcomes of that effort.“ Herbert Gutman similarly urges that educational historians transcend the exclusive study of institutional history by exploring such untouched areas as the “selfactivity” of workers and its relationship to class development and class formation. Rolland Paulston delineates a theoretical framework to ascertain the social and economic conditions, ideological bases, programmatic characteristics, and contributions of “nonformal education” in social movements. He posits that nonformal education functions as structured, systematic, nonschool education that relies upon training activities of relatively short duration and involves a fairly distinct target population. “It is, in sum, education that does not advance to a higher level of the hierarchical formal school system.”

Ironically perhaps, literary evidence has often proved a misleading or inadequate basis for the study of popular literacy in the past. The reasons for this observation include the approaches and assumptions of researchers, the types of literary sources examined, biases of both students and their data, researchers' misplaced emphases and expectations, inadequate notions of the meaning of “literacy” as well as that of the “popular” among reading publics, and the literary materials available for perusal.

Johnny Carson recently observed that he could tell that the new academic year was about to commence because the maternity boutiques on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills were having their “Back to School” sales. This comment nicely captured a profound, if still theoretical, transformation in the way Americans have responded to pregnant and wayward adolescents, for it was not until the late 1960s that they were permitted to attend school at all. Even then they were ordinarily segregated in isolated facilities to diminish their contaminating effect on other adolescents. An examination of the evolution of the education of “girls with special needs,” to employ a current euphemism, must consequently consider the organization of private-sector programs and voluntary agencies to provide rehabilitative services for a population most Americans considered to be too degraded or demoralized to enroll in regular classrooms.

From the study of history, wrote Newton Edwards in 1949 in the first issue of History of Education Journal, “one may gain insight into the problems of one's own time and become more intelligent with respect to the shaping of future policy.” But, he continued, “if history is to achieve this purpose most effectively, it must … be regarded as a seamless web.” We can wholeheartedly agree with Edwards' affirmation of the usefulness of history of education. But if history is a “seamless web,” it is so only in theory. In practice, each of us must unravel the seamless web in our own way, based on our convictions, interests, and temperament, and hope that even this partial unraveling may still provide some insight into the educational problems of our time and some usefulness for the formulation of future policy.

The concept of “Ecology” has experienced some notable mutaions, since it was introduced by Ernest Haeckel, the German biologist, in 1869. This paper outlines its growth as a social concept and discusses ways in which an ecological approach can illuminate the study of urban education in the nineteenth century. The first section surveys the development of ecologial principles from their prototypical and still implicit use in the empirical social surveys of the nineteenth century, through their more formal attachment to a theory of urban society in the 1920s, as far as the 1970s when, despite all the vicissitudes faced over the previous half-century, they continued to be accepted as somewhat valid in the explanation of urban society.

The independence of Spanish America presented new problems to the republics created out of the wreckage of Spain's American Empire. Economic restructuring, political organization, relations with neighbors and Europe, and the rise of new political groups all occupied the attention of young governments. One of the many social questions that had to be faced was that of education. Was it to be elitist and traditional as in the colonial era? Would the Church still be the primary agency for education? And how should formal learning be utilized for the good of the new societies?

Though the pressures for change had been building for some time, reform came suddenly to the Atlanta public school system. On May 28, 1897, in a City Council meeting ostensibly called to consider some routine matters pertaining to the city's water works, Alderman James G. Woodward introduced a resolution which replaced the sitting seventeen-member school board with a new board comprising one member from each of the city's seven wards. Despite a recent escalation in the level of conflict between the school board and Mayor Charles Collier, the move came as a complete surprise to virtually everyone in Atlanta, including all of the members of the school board. The entire operation took only a few minutes. As the Atlanta Constitution observed the next day:

A highly regarded work in recent educational history, Raymond E. Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962), persuasively described early twentieth-century educators' capitulation to principles of business management. However, my research into nineteenth-century teacher-training literature has indicated that, long before 1900, schoolmen had assumed a business rather than a scholarly identity. Subsequent investigation into the origin and development of the public school superintendency amplified my earlier findings.

During the twenty-five years, 1776–1800, sixteen colleges opened in the United States that still operate today. They almost tripled the total number of the nation's colleges. The increase demonstrated the augmenting American interest in higher education and also the restless, expansive urge of the American people, for with the exceptions of the College of Charleston and St. John's College in the Chesapeake port of Annapolis, these institutions arose on the edge of settlement: in upstate New York, the district of Maine, northeastern Georgia, western Massachusetts, and even in the Territory South of the Ohio, two years before it became the state of Tennessee. Indeed, their location on the frontier was one of the primary determinants of these colleges' character, for it led these colleges to develop functions, commitments, and curricular and atmospheric traits that differed somewhat from those of the established, seaboard colleges.

Described by one unsympathetic observer in Buffalo as “Schools of Nonsense” and by one ardent participant in Milwaukee as “rebel factories,” the movement to establish Socialist Sunday schools (S.S.S.) in the United States during the early twentieth century is perhaps one of the best kept secrets of American socialist and educational historiography. This essay attempts to rectify that situation by analyzing an educational movement that falls outside of the traditional and progressive educational camps of the early 1900s. During these years numerous working-class radicals provided their children with a formal, weekend education that lacked the strong capitalistic biases dominant in the public schools.

When Stephan Thernstrom studied the children of laborers who lived in mid-nineteenth century Newburyport, Massachusetts, he made “a striking discovery.” The sons of those who had managed to purchase a home were less likely to be upwardly mobile. This finding, which at first sight seems so counterintuitive, Thernstrom explained in a manner that bears directly on the determinants of schooling in the nineteenth century:

Common sense suggests that youths from the thrifty, respectable, homeowning segment of the working class would develop higher ambitions than the children of laborers living at the bare subsistence level, and that they would possess superior resources in the contest for better jobs…. [But] the ordinary workman of nineteenth century Newburyport could rarely build up a savings account and purchase a home without making severe sacrifices. To cut family consumption expenditures to the bone was one such sacrifice. To withdraw the children from school and to put them to work at the age of ten or twelve was another. For the working class families of nineteenth century Newburyport, therefore property mobility did not usually facilitate inter-generational occupational mobility; often it was achieved by sacrificing the education of the younger generation.

From 1928 when he moved from the National Urban League to Fisk University until his untimely death in 1956, Charles S. Johnson was a major spokesman for black higher education in general and private, black southern colleges in particular. During that almost thirty year period he defended the uniqueness of their role in American higher education, while persistently urging them to elevate their academic quality to a level equal to that of mainstream colleges and universities.

In 1916, the Bureau of Education published The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the final report of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. The Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education was composed of sixteen committees, each addressing one aspect of the curriculum or administration of public education. Historians agree that The Social Studies in Secondary Education along with The Teaching of Community Civics, an earlier report of the Committee on the Social Studies, were among the most influential documents produced by the Commission. Many of the recommendations advanced in both reports, particularly those calling for the development of courses in Community Civics and Problems of American Democracy, were not only widely discussed by contemporaries, but also set the scope and sequence of social studies education which remained virtually unchanged until the early 1970s.

Since 1929 Mexican American organizations, headed by middle class leaders, have played a significant and increasing role in challenging discriminatory school policies and practices. Led and inspired by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G. I. Forum, the challenge to education has been essentially a liberal one. As most liberals, Mexican Americans have perceived discrimination, segregation, inferior schools, and culturally biased curriculum and instructional practices as problems incidental to education, not as specific manifestations of systematic structural inequality. As a result, they have not sought the improvement of the existing educational structure by eliminating those barriers which limit Mexican American access to and participation in that system. Hence, the challenge to education has been limited to abolishing segregated schools and student assignment and classification policies which serve to increase segregation. The following essay is a history of this campaign to eliminate the segregation of Mexican American children in the Texas public schools. Emphasis will be placed on the strategies and tactics utilized by LULAC and the G. I. Forum to desegregate the public schools. The period to be covered will be between 1929 and 1957. The year 1929 marks the period during which the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the first statewide civic organization of Americans of Mexican descent, was organized in Texas. In the latter year the last of a series of desegregation cases filed by the Mexican American community was won. For the next ten years (between 1957 and 1967) because of political, financial, and organizational difficulties, no further legal challenges to educational segregation were made by the Mexican American community. The campaign to desegregate the public schools by Mexican American organizations from 1929 to 1957 has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. This essay will hopefully contribute to this gap in the history of American minority groups by describing and tracing the nature of this campaign against separate and unequal schools for Mexican Americans in Texas.

In 1929 historian Willystine Goodsell noted the meager professional opportunities available to academic women. Only in the women's colleges did women professors of all ranks considerably outnumber the men. Goodsell concluded, “In the realm of higher education this is their one happy hunting ground and they make good use of it.” One such golden arena was the academic community of Wellesley College 1895–1920. Wellesley was the only women's college which from its founding in 1875 was committed to women presidents and a totally female professoriate. In the Progressive era this professoriate was a stellar cast: it included Katharine Coman, historian; Mary Calkins, philosopher; Vida Dutton Scudder, literary critic and social radical; Margaret Ferguson, botanist; Sarah Frances Whiting, physicist; Emily Greene Balch, economist; and Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. To outside observers this group had created a female Harvard, a “bubbling cauldron that seethed,” a “hotbed of radicalism.” To their students the noble faculty provided a rich world which stirred them. To the next generation of faculty women the “old crowd” were completely dedicated “war horses.” To each other, they were kindred spirits, diverse, but united in the “bonds of Wellesley.”