From the beginning of white settlement in America, Indian relations presented a major dilemma. The fate of American Indians, confronted as they were with the inexorable, dispossessing creep of white settlement, became a source of white concern. With the exception of a small handful of individuals, that concern was manifested not in a sense of basic human equality, but rather as an expression of white elitism and expansionist expediency. This perplexing dilemma was often referred to as the “Indian question,” as it posed an outwardly simple, yet deceptively complex question: What do we do with the Indians?

The popularization of science in nineteenth-century America is inseparable from the democratization of Western society in the early modern era. The contempt for labor that characterized the medieval attitude was gradually replaced by a new spirit whose roots go back to at least the twelfth century and which accompanied the rise in economic importance of the skilled craftsman and mechanic in a modernizing economy. The new importance of the artisan-mechanic to the economy forced a reconsideration of the proper relationship between the artisan and the scientist. The association of knowledge with its applications — its utility—was interwoven with a growing self-conception that the productions of the craftsman and the mechanic made possible a grasp of regularities and order in nature hitherto not even so conceptualized. Advances in techniques and in the material conditions of life were accompanied by corresponding changes in the perception and conceptualization of nature and society. The artisan achieved a new and elevated status of dignity and place. He worked in close collaboration with scientists, and frequently the distinctions between them were blurred and undefined.

The contours of urban school reform in the Progressive era have now assumed a familiar form. While the most influential interpretations of the past decade differ somewhat in intent and emphasis, they all emphasize the essential elitism, conservatism, and importance of various school reforms enacted in the early twentieth century. This is true of scholars with a wide range of political interests and ideological concerns. This essay, which is a social analysis of organized labor, socialism, and the Milwaukee schools during the Progressive era, examines the political fortunes of one of the most successful labor movements in American history. Besides constituting a compelling story in its own right, Milwaukee Socialism highlights well the process of Progressive era educational reform; indeed, it reveals the complex historical interactions that produced the distinctive reform coalitions of the age. A study of Milwaukee's socialist labor movement demonstrates how particular working people influenced school reform in a time of rapid social change, and it also demonstrates how they in turn were shaped by the reform groups that helped inaugurate many of the period's innovative educational programs.

The presidential address is one of the freer forms of professional communication currently in use in the American academic community. One can get a glimpse of freedom of the form by briefly perusing the presidential messages published in various historical journals over the past five or so years. A president may, like William Bouwsma, touch on a current in his own specialty because it is of “considerable importance for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part.” And, using his own expertise in Renaissance history, he proceeded to identify changes in Renaissance historiography, with the larger theme of “the collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history.” Other options which have been exercised by historian presidents include the challenge to improve teaching offered by Gilbert C. Fite to his colleages in the Southern Historical Association or the consideration of the effects of the federal government on all aspects of the historical profession offered by Richard W. Leopold to the Organization of American Historians.

The work of William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965) in the area of race and ethnic relations presents an opportunity to explore how one of the foremost educators of his time responded to a difficult and potentially dangerous aspect of American life. A consistent spokesman for New South approaches to racial injustice and a key member of the early intercultural education movement, he was also an influential officer of the New York Urban League in its formative years. Indeed, Kilpatrick's example as a pioneer in these affairs provides insight into the “liberal pluralist” outlook which came to prevail in American education for almost forty years, an outlook which only recently has come under scrutiny and criticism by scholars of race relations and ethnicity.

Philanthropy in America has sparked numerous innovations in the fields of education, social work, and public health, but rarely has it been instrumental in generating and sustaining a popular social movement. In the Post-World War One decade, however, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) did just that, subtly but aggressively nurturing and coordinating the long-since-forgotten parent education movement. For hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans, principally young mothers, parent education provided not only a topic of everyday conversation and a structure for continuing education, but a genuine social cause. Philanthropy alone did not create this crusade, of course. Many other factors were involved, some antedating the war, others originating in the twenties and reflecting its distinctive political and cultural spirit. Nonetheless, LSRM's role was central and formative, and merits considerably more attention from historians of education and of philanthropy than it has heretofore received.

“Woman is the guardian of the foyer. Her place is at home, in the house of her parents or husband…; it is for the foyer that she must reserve all her grace and good humor…. A woman who does not love her home, who has no taste for household duties… cannot remain a virtuous woman for long.” Such were the instructions and warnings about the domestic mission of women which Madame Henry Gréville offered to French schoolgirls in one of the most widely used textbooks for moral and civic education in girls' public primary schools during the late nineteenth century. Gréville's teaching conformed to the wishes of the Ministry of Public Instruction which ordered that primary schools should prepare boys to become workers and soldiers and initiate girls in the “care of the household and ouvrages de femmes.”

Anyone who has discussed the history of childhood with college students will surely have noticed that most of those students have not yet paid close attention to children. The children whom they imagine turn out to be memories of themselves. This is hardly surprising; it is just one more way of saying that it takes a truly mature person to understand a child. Our immaturity is responsible for our projections, and through most of history “childhood” has been a projection—of self-pity, self-righteousness, or self-hate. At times, “the child” has served as a cultural icon for a whole society—an image of perfection or of some power or virtue which adults seem to have lost. And we can expect some devotion to the child's image to persist throughout human history, so long as our most powerful memories refer to that stage of life. There are periods, indeed, which are characterized by a veritable cult of childhood.

The United States has produced a lively and impressive body of scholarship on the education of freedmen during Reconstruction The story has a consistently melancholy tone— that of the hopes, aspirations and rhetoric which accompanied the perilous journey from unschooled bondsman to schooled freedman — a journey which culminated in broken promises and repressive realities. It is too frequently forgotten that such an experience had been shared some thirty years previously in the British West Indies after the 1833 Act of Emancipation. The story however is somewhat different in that formal schooling had been available to some of the black population during slavery. When the dubious regulations of servitude were lifted while its real abuses remained, the British Government's Negro Education Grant, which spanned a decade from 1835–45, expanded existing missionary facilities so that during the apprenticeship period, 1834–38, the ex-slaves could be satisfactorily prepared for freedom. This preparation intended that they comprehend the skills, qualities, and virtues requisite for taking upon themselves the apparently onerous burden of their emancipation, thus becoming a “grateful peasantry.”

In Russia during the era of Catherine II (1762–1796), women's education was advocated as a means to reform family, social and civic life. Fénelon's Traité de l'éducation des Filles (1686) and his didactic novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque, carried this argument to Russia where it was reinforced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. In a society with substantial prejudice against mere literacy for women, this position represents a progressive call for expanded educational opportunities for girls. The message was interpreted in this fashion by its European and Russian proponents who presumed that they were acting in accordance with reason and nature. But the restraints inherent in this domestic orientation make it as much a campaign against excessive emancipation as a plea to remove women from complete ignorance. In this essay, I explore this limited advocacy from the Russian perspective. This ambivalence is demonstrable throughout the reign of Catherine II and at different social levels, though most attention was focused on the nobility for whom the Society for the Education of Noble Girls (the Smol'nyi Institute) was founded.

In those decades immediately preceding World War I, referred to nostalgically as “La Belle Epoque,” higher education returned to France. The Third Republic restored it to life, although its heartland remained the old Latin Quarter where there now arose in dominion architect Paul Nénot's “University Palace:” a giant rectangular building one hundred yards in breadth and almost three hundred yards long, a concentration of auditoriums, exam rooms, lecture halls, laboratories, offices, libraries and museums that then made of the New Sorbonne the nation's greatest institution of higher learning. A three-fold expansion and reconstruction by the republic of the original structure, its massive grey walls, nevertheless, appeared more hewn to the form of some ancient bastille than to any suitable republican symbol.

Herodes Atticus (A.D. 101–176), the Athenian millionaire, Roman consul, celebrated sophist and friend and teacher of Roman Emperors was one of the best known figures of the Antonine Period. Philostratus, the author of the Lives of the Sophists, written ca. A.D. 230, gives Herodes considerably more space than any other sophist; he is the subject of Graindor's solid though dated biography, of Rutledge's admirable doctoral thesis, and is one of the major figures in Bowersock's brilliant work on the Greek sophists in the Roman Empire. Herodes' education and teaching career, however, have never been adequately studied. It is the aim of this essay to do that.

In the orthodox, “Whig” interpretations of the history of education of nineteenth-century France the focus of attention has traditionally been on the triumph of free, obligatory and secular education. In recent years historians have attempted to provide a more balanced picture by also chronicling the activities of the “losers” in this confrontation — the defenders of religious education. But one group has been left out of both accounts—the propagandists for a working-class education free of the interference of both the Catholic Church and the capitalist state. Of this latter group of thinkers the most interesting was Paul Robin, not simply because his views were the most radical, but because for over a decade this educational anarchist controlled an institution in which he could test his theories in practice. The purpose of the following account of Robin's work is first to illustrate the links that bound together the sexual, political and educational concerns of the libertarian left and secondly to show how deeply rooted in the past century are the current debates regarding the education of women and workers.

Seventeenth century England, like the rest of western Europe in the early modern period, was a patriarchal society. It had been such for a long time and would remain so until industrialization and the concept of greater individualism began to upset traditional values. The notion of family was quite different then from what it is now: the family included all persons living in a household whether they were related or not. Thus, servants, apprentices, and live-in employees were part of the employer's family and the head of the household was its absolute master, serving as surrogate father to those not actually his children. His relationship with the younger members of the family was similar to the relationship between the absolute monarchs of the era and their subjects. Of course, not all subjects were dutiful and obedient sons or daughters of the father figure, either in the state or in the family, but the ideal was patriachalism in every social unit. This ideal was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the institution of apprenticeship. This essay will concentrate on the apprentices of London during the early seventeenth century and will describe both the ideal and the reality of apprentice-master relationships.