After the First World War, the League of Nations, through its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, attempted to reshape the teaching of history in its member states. The League's supporters realized that its long-term success depended in part on supportive public opinion and that this, in turn, had implications for education. Aware of the strength of national loyalties, the League sought not to abolish the teaching of national history but to suffuse it with the spirit of the “international mind.” To this end, the League promoted revision of history textbooks and curricula, retraining of teachers, and rethinking of teaching methods. National governments responded by including some study of the League in history curricula but ignored the League's broader plans. Nonetheless, the League's attempt to internationalize the teaching of history opened up a debate that continues today as schools seek to strike a balance between claims of national and global history.

Mainstream historiography often turns to Europe's era of empire building to explain the expansion of Western formal education in Africa. Popular accounts suggest that in Africa (1) colonial involvement in education was late and short lived, spanning the early decades of the twentieth century, (2) missionaries were largely responsible for early educational expansion, and (3) education expansion resulted from interdenominational rivalries among missionaries. However, these popular narratives inadequately account for Africans' own responses to colonial education. This study examines social and cultural shifts in northern Igboland in southeastern Nigeria between 1890 and 1930. It uses colonial archives and oral sources to demonstrate that beyond missionary rivalry, domestic contests converged with the fledgling colonial process to promote English education in northern Igboland. To accomplish this task, the article reviews methodological assumptions responsible for marginal attention to the agency of the colonized in the historiography of Western education in former colonies.

In March 1887, Eva Moll wrote about the previous summer in her diary: “The season was fall of rich things of course. Heard some fine violin and harp playing by two Italians. I never expect to hear ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ sweeter on this earth, than it was played by the violinist. We first went to Niagara, visiting all the points.” Moll was not a wealthy person of leisure. She was a single Kansas schoolteacher in her late twenties who struggled to make ends meet, and yet had spent nine weeks at the quintessentially middle-class Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. A slice of my larger investigation of the history of teachers' “summers off,” this essay will explore the social-class dimensions of their summertime activities during a distinctive period for both the middle class and the teaching force in the United States, the decades of the 1880s through the 1930s.

In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an integrated group of outside teachers and students to educate black students in a civil rights battleground over an entire summer.

In contrast to the racial and class tensions that arose between black leaders and predominantly white volunteers in other civil rights campaigns, PEC volunteers willingly deferred to the expertise of local and outside black leaders. This paper identifies the relatively modest scope and well-defined mission of the program, the real-world experiences of volunteers, and the high quality of black leadership as factors that led to this positive outcome.

During the 1840s and 1850s, members of the Creek Nation rejected schools as a colonial tool and instead experimented with various forms of education to fit their own local and national needs. Diverse individuals and communities articulated educational visions for their nation in conversation with fellow citizens, national leaders, and U.S. educators. Rather than embrace education to assimilate into the American republic, Creeks turned to schools and English literacy as one strategy to shape their own society and defend it from further Euro-American colonial policies. By the end of the 1850s, they had established a fledgling national school system consisting of both neighborhood and mission schools. These institutions reflected and reinforced changes in race, class, gender, culture, and religion in the antebellum Creek Nation.

In 1914, Henrietta Rodman, a high school English teacher and president of the newly formed Feminist Alliance in New York City, announced her group's plan to develop a twelve-story cooperative apartment house, based on the ideas of feminist philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that would meet the needs of professional working women like her, married with children. This research illustrates strategic activities teachers used in their attempts to reconceptualize wage-earning as the legitimate province of women, regardless of their marital or maternal status, and highlights the Feminist Alliance's contention that women's lack of economic self-determination lay at the root of female subordination.

In 1950, the Denver Catholic Register published an article describing and challenging the varieties of “prejudice” that a military pilot moving from base to base in the United States might encounter. To “successfully transact business” in the vicinity of various “metropolitan landing fields,” the writer admonished, the veteran must:

From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, a new idea drew the interest of local leaders and national networks of educators seeking to further desegregation but concerned about how to do so within the bounds of white resistance. Huge single- or multischool campuses, called education parks, would draw students from broad geographical areas and facilitate desegregation. But in the design and location choices for these imagined (but often not realized) education parks, desegregation advocates revealed a spatial ideology of schooling that reflected both a rejection of racialized black spaces and an antiurban, modernist aesthetic. Beyond recognizing the place of spatial ideology in desegregation advocacy, this article suggests that historians of education listen for ideas about space and their impact in other areas of educational history.

The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 was the first federal investment in low-interest student loans and became a precedent for expansion of student loans in the Higher Education Act of 1965. In its controversial loyalty provisions, the NDEA required loan recipients to affirm loyalty to the U.S. government. Between 1958 and 1962, thirty-two colleges and universities refused to participate or withdrew from the NDEA loan program, arguing that the loyalty provisions unfairly targeted students and violated principles of free inquiry. This essay argues that debate over the loyalty provisions fractured a partnership between progressives who favored general aid to education and conservatives who supported short-term investment for defense purposes. Although debates over the NDEA loyalty requirements seem specific to the Cold War, a close examination of the arguments illuminates their alignment with long-standing ideological conflicts over legitimacy of federal aid to higher education.

The school desegregation narrative often references historically white public schools as sites of massive resistance and historically white private schools as segregationist academies. Yet some historically white elite private schools or independent schools, such as The Westminster Schools (plural in name only), established in 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia, chose to desegregate. Such elite institutions, which have served as one catalyst for the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital, became more accessible after Brown v. Board of Education through a combination of private and public decisions galvanized by larger social, political, and federal forces. Westminster's 1965 decision to consider all applicants regardless of race was emblematic of the pragmatic desegregation politics of Atlanta's city leaders during the civil rights movement and a national independent school agenda focused on recruiting black students. Drawing on institutional, local, regional, and national archival records and publications, this article examines the import of schools like Westminster to civic and business leaders, to the politics of race and desegregation occurring in large cities, and to the range of educational opportunities available in metropolitan areas. This examination yields an analysis of the leadership and politics of a southern historically white elite private school that black students desegregated in 1961.

This article explores how education reformers in California pioneered forms of centralized educational governance between 1850 and 1879. Challenging previous scholarship that has attributed the success of this early educational state to reformer John Swett and New England migrants, this article situates the creation of common schools in California within the larger context of American state-building in the nineteenth-century West. While increased state authority over education was a goal for reformers across the nation, this article contends that California's early innovations in centralization reflected a regionally specific response to the dilemmas of governing a recently acquired territory distant from eastern centers of power. The precarious nature of elite attempts to convert California into an American place, reflected in perceived lawlessness, weak governmental authority, and racial anxiety, inspired forms of educational organization commonly associated with Progressive Era responses to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The desire to promote nineteenth-century American racial and governmental order in California, this article concludes, powerfully shaped the growth of public education in the state, influencing the organization of schooling in ways that suggest the importance of looking beyond the Northeast to understand the development of public education in the United States.

More than a musical genre, jazz in the 1920s was viewed by critics and supporters alike as a type of lifestyle, one that frequently led to drinking, dancing, and “petting.” Much to the horror of older generations, white young people were particularly drawn to jazz and its “hot rhythms.” Secondary school teachers and administrators took up the formidable task of persuading youth of jazz's morally corrupting influences. I argue that, in the first half of the decade, such educators instituted curricular and various informal policies designed to replace jazz, universally associated with black musicians, with more “wholesome” European-originated alternatives. By the latter part of the decade, however, most educators admitted a grudging acceptance of jazz's permanence and abandoned their efforts to convince students of its iniquity.

This essay examines the development of a research faculty and culture at the Lincoln School, a laboratory school founded in 1917 by the Rockefeller General Education Board (GEB) at Teachers College, Columbia University. The school was dedicated to the production of education research by practicing teachers. The essay focuses in particular on the role played by the two men first charged by the GEB to organize and administrate the school, Abraham Flexner and Otis Caldwell, and some of the school's teachers. Flexner and Caldwell promoted a working environment marked by experimentation, academic freedom, and faculty collaboration. This leadership model created tensions between Flexner and Caldwell and some Teachers College faculty over the use of Lincoln School classrooms as a resource for education research. Over the twenty-four years of the school's existence, Lincoln School teachers published hundreds of studies and textbooks focusing on curriculum development, child development, teaching techniques, and democratic school administration. In a profession where members are expected to be consumers rather than creators of knowledge, and practitioners rather than “experts,” the teachers and administrators of the Lincoln School defied many of the most foundational premises that have guided schools and the production of education research alike.

Focusing only on education exchanges between the United States and other countries, existing scholarship fails to illuminate how American-sponsored student migrations between other countries helped expand U.S. hegemony. This article attempts to rectify this limitation by looking at Taiwan's policies on overseas Chinese students (qiaosheng) in the 1950s. After the debacle of the Chinese Civil War and its retreat to Taiwan, the Kuomintang (KMT) sought to solicit overseas Chinese support and to counter Communist China's drive for “returning students.” The KMT-developed qiaosheng program faced difficulties until 1954, when the United States, seeing that Taiwan's project could serve its anti-Communist plan, started bankrolling the qiaosheng program, thereby enabling the KMT to lure more students away from Communist China. These findings suggest that overlooking U.S.-sponsored student migrations between nations outside the United States renders our analysis of international education exchanges and American imperialism incomplete.