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…

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…

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…

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…

Few regions in the U.S. boast a more plentiful array of historically significant sites than the 175-mile-long route between Monticello, Virginia, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. From the most venerated of Civil War battlefields to nine historic homes of U.S. presidents and thousands of sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the…

Universities around the world have been affected by the recent global economic crisis. Many are challenged by reduced resources, yet they also face greater demands to help spur recovery in their respective countries. This paper explores how colleges and universities in the United States were affected by, and subsequently responded to, several 20th…

In the fall 2005 semester, the author designed a course in the history of America's modern wars hoping to encourage students to criticize and oppose the country's current aggressions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Surveys of student attitude change suggest that the course did promote criticism but did far less to facilitate student activism. The author…

The federal Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines a "historically" black institution of higher education as "any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principle mission was, and is, the education of black Americans." They are usually referred to as HBCUs. Most private…

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political…

This theme issue of the "Social Studies Journal" focuses on the worldwide conflict known in the United States as the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The volume is dedicated to examining the conflict in Pennsylvania. Western Pennsylvania became a battle-scarred landscape as the British and French, with their Native American allies,…

This bibliography cites print materials dealing with the War of 1812. Textbooks, papers, journal articles, primary source materials, and manuscripts are listed. The bibliography is organized by the following 13 sections: General Texts; West and Northwest Frontier; Lake Erie; Niagara Frontier and Lake Ontario; The St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain;…

Describes how the author teaches a four-week course on the Vietnam War giving attention to the books, films, and guest speakers used. States that the course enables students to understand the significant and complex issues raised by the war so that they can appreciate the different truths contained in diverse perspectives. (GEA)

On June 28, 1951, France ratified the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which prohibited the torture of prisoners of war. On August 2, 1955, the United States of America ratified the same document. Between 1954 and 1962, France fought a war against Algeria, which sought its independence from colonial rule. From September 11, 2001 until the present, the…

Outlines the struggles of German-Americans in Chicago, Illinois during World War I. Contends these German-Americans met conflict, hostility, and pressure to compromise and reevaluate their place in Chicago as a result of the war. (BSR)