Modern American scientific identity has its roots in the colleges of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the botanical sciences as an example, this essay examines the conflicts between those who viewed scientists as cosmopolitan (or international) and those who viewed scientists as citizens (or servants) of the national state. Whereas today many American scientists claim a cosmopolitan identity, even as they decry steady declines in state aid, two centuries ago, they did just the opposite: to win public support, they quietly subsumed the ideals of cosmopolitanism within a commitment to national service, even as they deftly cultivated a new professional image rooted in a rhetoric of scientific internationalism. The construction of this new self-image was, I argue, a necessary precondition for the creation of the modern American research university—particularly the public research university—which sought to reconcile the competing ideals of scientific cosmopolitanism and citizenship.

Students in the early republic commonly stitched, drew, and painted maps of their states, nation, and world as part of their educations. Map drawing and geography were regarded as particularly appropriate subjects for girls, both as a pathway to literacy and as a means of demonstrating accomplishment. Many young girls exposed to map work in their own educations went on to become teachers themselves and carried these practices with them into an ever-growing national network of female academies and seminaries. These school maps and related penmanship journals also reveal a network and set of teaching practices around graphic literacy that has drawn little attention from historians. By drawing their country, students were making the nation manifest, inscribing its abstract boundaries and administrative units, and visualizing territory that most would never see firsthand. Map drawing was part of an intensely graphic education that significantly influenced reformers such as Emma Willard, though it also drew criticism from subsequent educators.

In nineteenth-century America, students buried their mathematics books. This practice consistently celebrated the milestone of passing through collegiate mathematics, yet it changed due to national events. This article considers the case of Bowdoin College, where students buried their books differently before and after the Civil War. Antebellum, they observed a complex “Burial of Calculus” with songs, parades, and mock prayers. Postbellum, students personified their books as a woman, placing stones marked “Anna” on the textbooks’ graves. Using archival investigations of students' pamphlets and textbooks, this paper argues that these changes resulted from the war's effects on education as well as changing attitudes toward death. Both the antebellum and postbellum rituals communicated understandings of mathematics and academic achievement, as connected through a mock funeral ritual. Through investigating these connections, this paper asserts the importance of student practices for our understanding of Civil War era education.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was one of the most significant legislative accomplishments in twentieth-century American politics. To date, legislative histories have usually argued that the ESEA's passage was the result of either auspicious political circumstances or the political skill of the Johnson White House. Complicating these histories, I argue here that the ESEA was the result of skillful entrepreneurship on the part of policymakers in the White House and in Congress, and that while some auspicious political circumstances existed, these had less to do with the 1964 landslide election and more to do with subtler changes in congressional rules and commitment assignments that had taken place over the previous decade. I illustrate how ESEA supporters collectively overcame daunting legislative roadblocks, including a fractious House of Representatives and the “Three Rs.” I conclude by reflecting on the relevance of the 1965 debates for today's education policy environment.

John Hale's book about the Freedom Schools during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and Crystal Sanders's work on the largest Head Start program run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) from 1965 to 1968 sit at the end of a long line of histories of the black freedom struggle's mass movement years in Mississippi. Mississippi civil rights histories form well-trodden ground, from trailblazers John Dittmer and Charles Payne and nearly twenty-five years of subsequent scholarship and research supported by the building of new archives, to oral histories collected around the recent movement milestone anniversaries and reunions. There is always room for more accounts and fresh vantage points, given the nature of mass movements simultaneously orchestrated on multiple levels and in multiple locales, each with its own nuance and host of characters. Each book illustrates the cacophony of stories, voices, opinions, conflicts, political scuffles, and sacrifices that constitute a mass of movements with many routes to vaguely defined (and not always agreed upon) goals. As I have said elsewhere, full stories are messy and complicated, reflecting the reality of life. Recognizing these activist pasts becomes more relevant with the new phase of mass protest in the persistent struggle for black freedom, particularly around the global and domestic Black Lives Matter movement.