For a brief moment in 1964, a network of alternative schools flourished as a central component of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. The Freedom Schools of the Mississippi Summer Project were sponsored by COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, an alliance of civil rights groups led by SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Through COFO, SNCC activists brought hundreds of northern volunteers, most of them white, to Mississippi for a few months to register voters and to teach in forty-one Freedom Schools. The schools offered young black Mississippians an education that public schools would not supply, one that both provided intellectual stimulation and linked learning to participation in the movement to transform the South's segregated society.

Near the end of 1940 Friedrich Hauptmann secretly fled to his native Germany, forsaking Rutgers University where he was chairman of the German department at the New Jersey College for Women (N.J.C.). Despite having acquired American citizenship the previous year (several months before the start of World War II), Hauptmann traveled on a German passport, with expenses paid by the Hitler government. This was undoubtedly a reward for “serving ‘the cultural-political interests of the Reich’ in New Jersey.”

From 1776 until the 1840s, America experienced a boom in the founding of societies dedicated to the spread of “useful knowledge.” Nearly one hundred such societies were founded, mainly in cities in the northeastern United States. Concomitantly, there was an increase in the number of publications devoted to the dissemination of useful knowledge. Accompanying this rapid growth of learned societies and journals were changing conceptions of what constituted useful knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, how and to whom that useful knowledge should be conveyed.