Dr. Jessie Wallace Hughan was a trailblazing New York City public school educator and pacifist. Hughan was a socialist, and she was among numerous teachers who faced investigations for anti-patriotic activities at the turn of the 20th-century, when teachers across the country faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges if they were suspected of…

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to understand teaching and learning not just as cognitive but also as affective experiences that are imbued with emotional complexity. There is also an emergent body of research on how to teach difficult knowledge of war. Joining this scholarship, this article presents research…

Between 1636 and 1769, the American colonists established nine institutions of higher learning: Harvard College, the College of William & Mary, Yale College, the College of New Jersey, the College of Philadelphia, King's College, the College of Rhode Island, Queen's College, and Dartmouth College. These nine centers of learning, stretching…

Historians have long appreciated the value of the U.S. Census as a source of statistical data for studying nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. However, in ways that many other primary source documents do not, the census reflects and addresses social, political, and economic issues on national, state, and community levels…

America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the…

Sam Pullan explains how a chance encounter has helped him to improve his introduction to the modern themes and founding documents of US politics. Working with a professional historian whom he met, by chance, over dinner, he was able to produce lessons at the cutting edge of subject knowledge to grab the attention of his Year 11 pupils. This…

Struck by their sixth-form students' self-doubt when asked to make an historical claim, teachers Carina Ancell and Alan Kunna went in search of ways to build their students' confidence. A fruitful discussion with university lecturers Toby Green and Chris Dillon, about the challenges faced by first-year undergraduates in seminar discussion, led to…

Why do we teach U.S. history and government to students? The answer is simple: to prepare students for engaged and informed citizenry, the essential ingredient for preserving the American republic. Unfortunately, ACTA's most recent "What Will They Learn?"® survey of the core curricula at over 1,100 colleges and universities found that…

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and…

Historically, tactful and calculated development efforts have been attempted through various avenues in American higher education institutions. Higher education institutions have been creative in their attempts to ensure financial solvency. However, the common fallback of tuition increases have proved insufficient to meet most institutions'…

The death of the "liberal arts," however defined, is a motif of lament in American higher education. It became a popular leitmotif in the late nineteenth century. Over the past century, there have been heated debates about the future of the liberal arts curriculum, mostly based in a narrative of decline from a golden age just beyond the…

Haskell Indian Nations University opened 133 years ago, on September 17, 1884, as the U.S. Training and Industrial School--one of three original tribal boarding schools funded by the United States Congress. Three years later the school changed its name to Haskell Institute in honor of Chase Dudley Haskell, a U.S. representative from the Second…

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,…

In 1866, military drill and instruction became part of the curriculum of Maryland Agricultural College as a result of the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, a law setting the terms for the establishment of agricultural colleges across the USA. The introduction of military instruction meant a direct inclusion of physically active coursework that…

When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as "wisdom's special workshop." He could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the eight-hundred-year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today,…