In his introduction to volume one, number one, of the History of Education Journal, published in autumn 1949, R. Freeman Butts asked, “What would historians be if they did not look at their own history?” Professor Butts did not answer his question, so we may assume it was rhetorical. Yet it would be inexcusable to discuss the future of the history of education as a professional field without some reference to its origins and development. As Lawrence Cremin has noted, the history of education was an important part of the professional training of teachers well before the Civil War and by the early twentieth century had become a virtually universal component of teacher education programs.

As bastions of tradition and instigators of change, universities periodically confront the tension embedded in those two antagonistic roles. The latent conflict between tradition and change often becomes manifest when new leadership is chosen. Presidential selection can be an occasion for defining the purposes of an institution; consequently, struggles over these appointments take on prophetic significance. The appointment of Robert Maynard Hutchins as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1929 was such an occasion. During his twenty-two-year tenure at Chicago Hutchins became a leading voice of educational reform and made his college the focus of national interest. The legacy of the Hutchins years is much disputed, but that is another story. This article will instead describe how a thirty-year-old easterner came to a prominent leadership post in the Midwest.

Many governments in the twentieth century have attempted to transform their societies. Emerging states have faced the formidable task of nation-building, that is, of creating national unity and loyalty among citizens unaccustomed to living and working together within the same political system. New democracies have tried to educate new generations of “democratic” citizens, while authoritarian regimes have sought to indoctrinate their citizens in their ideologies, or simply in the habits of obedience. Leaders across the political spectrum have viewed the state as a tool for building a new and better society, with the schools as its foundation. In interwar Europe, the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, and Fascist Italy undertook the education of a new generation of citizens with unprecedented thoroughness. Their governments strengthened their control over school curricula, textbooks, and teachers through strict censorship and compulsory youth organizations.

The black civil rights movement of the early 1960s was a mass movement that used activist tactics, was committed to a philosophy of nonviolence, and sought racial integration and equality as its goal. By the middle of the decade, this movement had achieved a considerable measure of success. Race segregation in America, while not yet abolished, had been stripped of the institutional legitimacy it had previously enjoyed. In the process, America's culture and politics were transformed.