Funding for schools of all kinds was largely market-based until the Civil War. Parents in New York and other northern states continued to pay tuition, or rate bills, in addition to taxes to support common schools. Previous research relied on aggregate state-level data to estimate the amount of funding from public and nonpublic sources for common schools, while existing case studies of local school practices focus exclusively on Massachusetts or on urban locations and thus on exceptions to the rule. This study looks at local practices of school funding for multiple types of schools in one unexceptional rural town in western New York from 1815 to 1850. The results reveal considerable in-state variation in the proportion of public and private funding for common schools that is otherwise obscured by state-level data. The proportion of school funds that came from tuition was much higher for rural areas than for urban areas. The article also compares tuition funding for common schools with that for other types of market-based schooling, including two local venture schools and one local academy. The results show that, although tuition prices for academies and venture schools were predictably higher than for common schools, the overall structure of school funding for rural common schools and academies was more similar than different in New York in the antebellum era.

The recent shift away from the idea of centrally planned public systems and toward market-based models of schooling opens new territory for scholarship in the history of education. What is the history of education markets? How has the structure of education markets changed over time? This article addresses these questions by surveying existing literature, with an emphasis on the early national and antebellum periods. In the process it brings new perspectives to standard narratives of the history of education in the nineteenth century, particularly regarding the development of state-based educational systems. It then proposes areas for future research and concludes by introducing two examples of new work in this field.

Visual and oral, video and audio evidence are brought to bear to examine the history of the U.S. census and the practice of social science history. The article explores how artists have appropriated and depicted census taking in America and how census takers used “artistic” forms of evidence to advertise and promote the census and explicate census results to the public. The article also suggests how social science historians have understood and used the new electronic environment of the Internet and the World Wide Web to present their data and findings.

Enumeration, even the contemporary census, cannot be characterized as neutral and objective data collection; official categories both shape and are shaped by national cultures. This article examines the forms, laws, and procedures of Japanese household registration (koseki) and national censuses in three cases from the modern period (1868 to post-World War II). Each case isolates a particular time period to show how broad political cultures, such as Westernization, the development of state welfare, and democratization, were codified or reflected discursively in enumerative programs. In each case, categories shifted the substantive and practical meanings of individuals in families and of household heads in relation to the state. In the early Meiji period (1868-1912), an aristocratic, head-centric social order was imposed on all classes through household registration. By the late Meiji and through the Taisho (1912-36) and early Showa periods (1936-89), census categories reflected a new household model based on economic and spatial relations. In the reconstruction period following World War II, the household register embodied the dramatic changes to the civil code that established equality of sexes and the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit. By the 1960s, however, census forms reflected a return of national cultural discourse to hierarchical, extended-stem family households.

Social historians have demonstrated that although men comprised the majority of teachers in North Carolina schools and academies during the early national period, women predominated by the end of the nineteenth century. This study concludes that among the music teachers who taught in academies and venture schools, women gained a majority decades earlier. In an effort to understand some of the underlying social processes that contributed to this shift, the following discussion analyzes the changing proportion of men and women in a sample of 65 music teachers, tracks the tuition they charged in a free market, and compares this to the tuition charged by teachers of Latin and Greek. The shift to women among music teachers in North Carolina presents an intriguing case, because it does not fit well with some earlier theoretical models of feminization among nineteenth-century teachers. The data suggest that women came to predominate among music teachers because a changing market for music instruction in venture schools and academies triggered a process of occupational abandonment and succession.

The international rise of mass education over the past few centuries is often seen by historians as due to the increasingly long arm of the state (see, e.g., Lindert 2004). On this view, the early rise and high level of mass education in the United States in contrast with its colonial ruler Great Britain reflects the ability of Americans to mobilize local and state government support for public education from the earliest days of the Republic. Indeed, institutions dating to the colonial era could have been at work. The articles in this special section are informed by the view that schools and the instructional services they offered during the antebellum period were subject to the choices of buyers and sellers of these services. The article by Kim Tolley provides a rich case study of this basic principle with her account of Mrs. Sambourne's foray into music teaching in early-nineteenth-century North Carolina.