Small colleges in the “Age of the University” have been neglected. For years, historians have dismissed the college with a wave of President Eliot's inaugural speech and ushered the university builders onto center stage. Few studies have gone beyond Laurence Veysey's generalization that “the only course of action” those in charge of colleges “could urge was to hold on, perhaps making minor concessions, and hope that their institution would be able to survive.” Implicitly colleges have been assumed to be uniform and passive institutions that only broke from antebellum practices in reluctant response to the universities. Although the new models of higher education had an important effect, the prevailing stereotype misses the extent to which colleges shaped their policies in terms of local, denominational and institutional circumstances. The resulting diversity suggests that colleges, like other traditional institutions facing modernization, participated in the shaping of their destinies and were not merely passive victims.

The Short Career of Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) has been useful in various ways to students of American intellectual history. For cultural observers such as Van Wyck Brooks and Christopher Lasch, Bourne's life and work are symbolic of the youthful questioning that characterized the intellectual mood of the 1890's–1920's. Bourne's writing touched on nearly all of the issues of his time—cultural nationalism, progressive education, socialism, feminism—with an adolescent vigor which made him, both then and now, an appropriate spokesman for his generation. Bourne has also served those with more specific interests: for the historian of education, Bourne's articles in The Gary Schools provide vivid testimony to the exciting innovations inspired by John Dewey's pedagogy; while for the historian of philosophy, Bourne's disillusionment with Dewey's “pragmatic” stance during World War I offers an episode in the history of a philosophical debate which began with Plato and Aristotle (or earlier). Finally, for those who value the role of the critic in America, and who believe that the health of any society requires a periodic questioning of its accepted values, Randolph Bourne is an important figure.

How does one study Catholic history? It is easy to acknowledge that, on the whole, it has not been studied well. As Andrew Greeley tirelessly reminds us, Catholics have been of only peripheral interest to historians and social scientists. The historiography of American Catholicism has traditionally been directed at confirming Catholic beliefs and commitments to the Church's institutional structure. The argument generally offered is that the flock, threatened by a Protestant environment and by attacks on Catholics, sought consolation in the Church and forged structures essentially compatible with loyal Americanism. Initial historical writings stressed the heroism and piety of early Catholic missionaries, immigrant patriotism, and Catholic difficulties in times of anti-Catholic agitation. Religious questions and Church institutions, the hierarchy (especially the “liberals” within it), the Irish (except where the non-Irish are presented as a “problem”), and neglect of the years since World War I except as a measure of the triumph of Roman Catholicism as an American middle class religion have been its hallmarks. Only the internal Church controversies between liberal and conservative clergy and the ethnic tensions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have suggested the complexity and subtlety of American Catholicism.