This dissertation delves into the profound impact of the Second Great Awakening on American higher education and its enduring social consequences. Examining the period from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the research uncovers the core belief that drove the Awakening--that America and its citizens were chosen for a…

This paper investigates the historical context, internal content, and educational significance of Higher Arithmetic, a 1919 mathematics text by David Eugene Smith and George Wentworth, which has been insufficiently studied. Through historical and content analysis, this study reveals the authors' intention to provide a review and extension of…

Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," described the frontier as the lifeblood of American ideals and warned that the frontier's closing would mean the factors that once enabled America to prosper could no longer be relied on in the century ahead. Boy scouting was shaped by a similar nostalgia for the vanishing frontier as well as…

Recent scholarship has focused on the vital role of social movement organizations as key pathways into activism. Yet attention to how learning unfolds within social movement organizations has not been adequately studied. Informed by critical learning sciences, we investigated Kokua Hawaii, a social movement organization that catalyzed a near half…

Prior to the United States' (U.S.) illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom government in 1893 and illegal annexation in 1898, literacy rates and educational attainment in the Hawaiian Kingdom were amongst the highest in the world. In contrast to the educational history of the 19th century, the usurpation of the Hawaiian educational system…

The story of American superheroes cannot be told without the publisher DC and its evolving audience. During the latter 1930s and early 1940s, DC Comics assembled a catalog of superheroes that became the archetype of the genre itself: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. As DC Comics' audience and market grew throughout the decades, the company's…

This article examines the possibilities and limits of strategies directed toward racialized healing amidst declarations of pandemics and legislative attacks on public school teachers. We question what these strategies take as a self-evident truth: that race and racism can be conceptualized in terms of health and transparently addressed through…

In "Confessions of a School Reformer," eminent historian of education Larry Cuban reflects on nearly a century of education reforms and his experiences with them as a student, educator, and administrator. Cuban begins his own story in the 1930s, when he entered first grade at a Pittsburgh public school, the youngest son of Russian…

Settler archives are situated across the U.S. and housed within institutions such as university campuses. They were invented and placed strategically to help attune the world both to ideal representations of knowledge, understanding, and humanity and to their promises of salvation, progress, and development. In this essay, I argue settler archives…

Having grown up Black in America, the author reflects on his limited exposure to African American literature in school as well as his even more limited opportunity to see himself reflected in the mirrors of those texts. The article then extends into a framework for expanding the inclusion of African American texts in educators' classrooms.…

This paper conceptualises one possible antidote to the conditions that produce public mass gun violence (PMGV) in the United States. I begin by illuminating how PMGV is a backlash to the nation's 'founding' on the violent divisions of colonisation and coloniality. I then inquire: If PMGV is a reflection of a deep societal wound, what methodologies…

On a hot July day in 1854, 24-year-old schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings, accompanied by a friend, attempted to board a horse-drawn trolley to attend Sunday church services in Lower Manhattan. The Irish conductor refused, telling Jennings, who was African American, to await a horsecar for "her people." When Jennings resisted, the…

Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange's photojournalist activism during World War II was a direct response to President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 (EO 9066), which led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in 10 camps across seven mostly western states. Approximately two-thirds of those imprisoned were U.S.…

A critical reappraisal of the origin story of early care and education (ECE) in the United States, this article unsettles dominant narratives by investigating the carceral foundations and liberatory strategies that characterise the emergence and sociopolitical evolution of ECE. Integrating Foucauldian counter-historical genealogy and…

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a novel United States federal education programme that enrolled nearly three million men during the 1930s and early 1940s. This public work relief programme provides a case study of the ways that masculine, eugenicist ideas concerning public education evolved from the Progressive Era through the Great…