When examining the efforts of African Americans to create and operate viable primary and secondary schools from 1865 to 1870 in Kentucky, it is difficult to not contemplate what potentially might have been had national support for the Black transition from enslavement to freedom not waned. W.E.B. Dubois and several subsequent historians concluded…

"Teaching about Frederick Douglass" will stimulate conversation among liberal arts and education professionals as well as inform public school teachers about the life and times of Frederick Douglass. Tension exists at many institutions of higher education between liberal arts faculties who do not completely understand the function of education…

This essay revisits an iconic yet now languishing phrase in United States political culture--"Forty Acres and a Mule"--to clarify the meaning of freedom and to assess the contemporary meaning of its betrayal by the U.S. government immediately after the Civil War. Among the few citizens for whom the phrase still retains a semblance of…

Congressman George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts introduced a bill "to establish a system of national education" on February 25, 1870. This bill, and others that followed, opened an acrimonious political debate that lasted for twenty years. The opening salvos of that debate, and the regional issues of ethnicity and religion that framed…

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas." State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was declared a violation of the 14th Amendment and was unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the…

"American history," writer James Baldwin told a group of teachers in 1963, "is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it" (1963/1996, 227). Children, Baldwin argued, have "the right and necessity to examine everything." In particular, they need to…

Designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in education, this book covers education developments and trends beginning with the Colonial experience through the present day, placing an emphasis on post-World War II issues such as the role of technology, the standards movement, affirmative action, bilingual education, undocumented immigrants,…