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How/Should We Generalize?

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2020

Ansley T. Erickson
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Extract

In Carl Kaestle's 1992 essay “Standards of Evidence,” generalization is how we know when we know. Kaestle sketches a model of increasing certainty in historical claims as they are developed and refined at increasing scales of research, from local to international. A historical claim might originate in the study of a particular place or case, but to know that the claims were true, the historian needed to move from the microlevel view to a more macro one, perhaps at the national rather than local level. Once tested and refined through comparison with other cases, possibly smoothing some of the rougher edges in the process, the claim could then be transferred beyond national borders. When a historical claim is polished enough to fit other contexts, we know it is true. Kaestle illustrates this increasing certainty through increasing scale with reference to the history of literacy and, more specifically, to scholarship on how Western European and US industrialization shaped literacy rates. Bringing studies from various locales into connection, and then comparing these cases with the national context, Kaestle summarizes that it was the commercial processes of urbanization, rather than industrialization itself, that helped produce rising literacy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Generalization at greater scale becomes not only the means through which to claim the value of historical work, but the basis for constructing historical knowledge in the first place.

Keywords

history methodsarchivesmicrohistoryevidenceHarlemeducationhigh school
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 86 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Leah Gordon, Hilary Moss, and Tracy Steffes for a conversation that helped guide my approach to this essay; all of the students in my Teachers College classes who have queried the archive with me; Ernest Morrell, Esther Cyna, Rachel Klepper, and Karen Taylor for ongoing conversations about archives and silences; and the many Wadleigh community members who have shared stories, conversations, and critiques over the past seven years.

References

1 Kaestle, Carl, “Standards of Evidence in Historical Research: How Do We Know When We Know?,” History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Fall 1992), 361–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Kaestle, “Standards of Evidence,” 361.

3 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

4 Stoler, Ann, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2, no. 1–2 (March 2002), 87–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Critical attention to the archive is also an important if at times implicit element of several other fields related to history of education, including the history of childhood and Native American histories.

6 Erickson, Ansley T., Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Erickson, Ansley T. and Morrell, Ernest, eds. Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Wadleigh has been one focal point in the multipart Harlem Education History Project, harlemeducationhistory.library.columbia.edu.

8 Levi, Giovanni, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Burke, Peter, (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 102Google Scholar.

9 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990)Google Scholar; and Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John, and Tedeschi, Anne C. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

10 History of education has multiple examples of single-school studies that produced major reinterpretations. See Walker, Vanessa Siddle, Their Highest Potential: An African School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Labaree, David, The Making of the American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. More recent works include Purdy, Michelle, Transforming the Elite: Black Students and Desegregation in Private Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Erika Kitzmiller's work in progress on Philadelphia's Germantown High School.

11 In addition to the works on archives that I discuss below, this discussion is informed and inspired by the example of Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Her book is a powerful example of the “methodological and ethical project” of working at microscale to foreground the lives of often-silenced figures like enslaved women and how the archives shape what is known about their lives.

12 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 4.

13 As I planned this essay, I wondered if it was commonplace to think with Trouillot in the history of education. It may be that his ideas are fully absorbed into the structures of our training, in methods courses, and more. Yet a search of HEQ issues within JSTOR (1961–2013) yields no uses of the name in text or footnotes. Perhaps a revisiting of this now-classic text is valuable. In the interest of full disclosure, Trouillot's work was not part of my own training. I did not read Trouillot's Silencing the Past until about 2015, in a search for critical texts on archives to read with my students.

14 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.

15 Advisory Committee on Human Relations, “To the Members of the Teaching and Supervising Staff,” May 20, 1947, box 8, series 753, Bureau of Research, Reference, and Statistics, Pamphlet Collection, circa 1888–1966, Records of the New York City Board of Education, Municipal Archives of the City of New York (hereafter cited as Board of Education).

16 Ment, David, “Patterns of Public School segregation, 1900–1940: A Comparative Study of New York City, New Rochelle, and New Haven,” in Schools in Cities: Consensus and Conflict in American Educational History, ed. Ravitch, Diane and Goodenow, Ronald (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983)Google Scholar.

17 Continuing the survey of the HEQ corpus from note 13, I found one reference to the work of Ann Stoler in the journal. It engaged her work in the history of decolonization, but not with respect to archival studies. I came to Stoler's work via an interest in the structure of archives and archival information while working on Erickson, Ansley T., “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Note Cards,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Dougherty, Jack and Nawrotzki, Kristen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

18 In the history of education, we have strong examples of this reading against the grain, with Heather Williams's work on education in the context of slavery coming first to mind. She draws not on Stoler but on James Scott's notion of hidden transcripts. Williams, Heather Andrea, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Jackie Blount's Fit to Teach also demonstrates the practice, given the limitations of archival sources on gay and lesbian history. Blount, Jackie, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

19 Bureau of Reference, Research, and Statistics, Nationality Statistics Surveys, 1931–1947, series 763, Board of Education.

20 See Willis, Deborah, ed., Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Valdez, Vanessa K., Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Helton, Laura, “On Decimals, Catalogues, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading,” PMLA 134, no. 1 (Jan. 2019), 99–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Any reference to black individuals, communities, or institutions as “a problem” echoes with W. E. B. Du Bois's question “How does it feel to be a problem?” from his Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Dover Thrift, 2004).

21 Melva L. Price papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.

22 On the question of Price's identification and/or self-identification in the US Census, see Dan Bouk, “The Partners of Greenwich Village,” July 3, 2018, Census Stories, USA, https://censusstories.us/2018/07/03/partners.html.

23 See Wadleigh Junior High School yearbooks digitized as part of the Harlem Education History Project, https://harlemeducationhistory.library.columbia.edu/collection/wad_yb.

24 Other historians of education have made use of school yearbooks. Interpretations have often been more superficial than the sources merit, though (for example, as a source for counting students by ethnic category rather than the querying of those categories). See Fass, Paula S., Oustide In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Grade books of Wadleigh teacher Doris Brunson are in box 6, folder 2, Wadleigh High School Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.

25 It is not fully clear yet, in Judith Kafka's terms, what this is a case study of. Kafka, , “Institutional Theory and the History of District-Level School Reform,” in The Shifting Landscape of the American School District: Race, Class, Geography, and the Perpetual Reform of Local Control, 1935–2015, ed. Gamson, David and Hodge, Emily (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 223–38Google Scholar.

26 Williams, Self-Taught. See also Hager, Christopher, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

27 Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kaestle, Carl, Pillars of the Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google Scholar.

28 Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, January 19, 2017, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/19/2017-01058/federal-policy-for-the-protection-of-human-subjects.