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History of Education: A Southern Exposure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Wayne J. Urban*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University

Extract

The presidential address is one of the freer forms of professional communication currently in use in the American academic community. One can get a glimpse of freedom of the form by briefly perusing the presidential messages published in various historical journals over the past five or so years. A president may, like William Bouwsma, touch on a current in his own specialty because it is of “considerable importance for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part.” And, using his own expertise in Renaissance history, he proceeded to identify changes in Renaissance historiography, with the larger theme of “the collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history.” Other options which have been exercised by historian presidents include the challenge to improve teaching offered by Gilbert C. Fite to his colleages in the Southern Historical Association or the consideration of the effects of the federal government on all aspects of the historical profession offered by Richard W. Leopold to the Organization of American Historians.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1 Bouwsma, William J., “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” American Historical Review, 39 (February, 1979): 115.Google Scholar

2 Fite, Gilbert C., “The Historian as Teacher: Professional Challenge and Opportunity,” Journal of Southern History, 41 (February, 1975): 318; and Leopold, Richard W., “The Historian and the Federal Government,” Journal of American History, 64 (June, 1977): 5–23.Google Scholar

3 Katz, Michael B., “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly, 16 (Winter, 1976): 381406; Karier, Clarence H., “The Quest for Orderly Change: Some Reflections,” Ibid., 19 (Summer, 1979): 156–77; Calam, John, “A Letter from Quesnel: The Teacher in History and Other Fables,” Ibid., 15 (Summer, 1975): 131–45; Herbst, Jurgen, “Beyond the Debate over Revisionism: Three Educational Pasts Writ Large,” Ibid., 20 (Summer, 1980): 131–45; and Clifford, Geraldine Joncich, “Home and School in 19th Century America: Some Personal History Reports from the United States,” Ibid., 18 (Spring, 1978): 3–34.Google Scholar

4 I would add that the success of last year's meeting in Washington, D. C. reflected the determination of both the national society and the Southern regional group to work together to overcome the difficulties created by the boycott.Google Scholar

5 Degler, Carl N., Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge, 1977), passim ; and Cash, W.J., The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), p. viii.Google Scholar

6 Williams, William A., Some Presidents: Wilson to Nixon (New York, 1972); Radosh, Ronald, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York, 1975); Diggins, John P., Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975); and Genovese, Eugene D., The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

7 The similarities between old left and new right have been vividly explored by one of my doctoral students in an unpublished essay, Kohler, John, “Old South Radicals and Contemporary Thought.” Google Scholar

8 Urban, Wayne J., Why Teachers Organized, (Detroit: forthcoming) and Wills, Gary, Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, 1979), p. 137.Google Scholar

9 Urban, Wayne J., “The Union Label,” Review of Education, 2 (November-December, 1976): 542–49.Google Scholar

10 Urban, Wayne J., “Educational Reform in a New South City: Atlanta, 1890–1925,” in Goodenow, Ronald and White, Arthur, eds., Education and the Rise of the New South (Boston, in press), and Krug, Edward A., The Shaping of the American High School 1880–1920 (New York, 1964), p. 186.Google Scholar

11 Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 139–51.Google Scholar

12 Tyack, David B., “The Tribe and the Common School: Community Control in Rural Education,” American Quarterly, 24 (Spring, 1972): 319. Spencer Maxcy of Louisiana State University is working on school consolidation in the rural South.Google Scholar

13 Percy, Walker, interviewed by Carr, John, “It's Worth a Grown Man's Time,” in Carr, John, ed., Kite Flying and Other Irrational Acts: Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers Baton Rouge, 1972), p. 38, and Morris, Willie, interviewed by Carr, John, in Ibid., p. 118.Google Scholar

14 The Amish have been a long time thorn in the side of public school administrators because of their various objections to compulsory schooling. For their victory in one state on the issue of compulsion, see Wisconsin vs. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205(1972). A typically negative view of the objections of border state fundamentalists to public school textbooks can be found in Hillocks, George Jr., “Books and Bombs: Ideological Conflict and the School —a Case Study of the Kanawha County [West Virginia] Book Protest,” School Review, 86 (August, 1978): 632–54.Google Scholar

15 It is rare that a historian will discuss Catholic schooling apart from an ethnic context unless the discussion relates to some internal doctrinal or political matter.Google Scholar

16 Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community (New York, 1972); Gutman, Herbert G., The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1850–1925 (New York, 1976); Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York, 1974); and Webber, Thomas L., Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

17 Degler, , Place Over Time, 131, and Percy, , “It's Worth a Grown Man's Time,” 54.Google Scholar

18 Wolters, Raymond, “It's All Right If It's Not White: Recent Books on the History of Black Education,” History of Education Quarterly, 20 (Summer, 1980): 201, 204.Google Scholar

19 Barzun, Jacques, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and History (Chicago, 1974.)Google Scholar

20 Katz, Michael B., “Review of Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century,” Harvard Educational Review, 43 (August, 1973), 437438 and Katz, , “A Reply to Paul Violas,” Harvard Educational Review, 44 (May, 1974): 348.Google Scholar

21 Warren, Robert Penn, All the King's Men (New York, 1973 edition), p. 248.Google Scholar

22 Barzun, , Clio and the Doctors, pp. 97102, and Foote, Shelby, The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York, 1958), p. 815.Google Scholar

23 Vann Woodward, C., Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938), and Harlan, Louis, Booker T. Washington: The Making of A Black Leader 1856–1901 (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

24 Vann Woodward, C., The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1968 revised edition).Google Scholar

25 Herbst, , Beyond the Debate over Revisionism,” and Degler, Carl N., “Remaking American History,” Journal of American History 67, (June, 1980): 7–25.Google Scholar

26 Degler, , “Remaking American History,” p. 21.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 19.Google Scholar