When Alfred Lichtwark arrived in Hamburg in the fall of 1886, he came fully determined to launch a cultural renaissance that would engulf all of Imperial Germany. As his chief weapons, Lichtwark would employ his compelling personality and his newly acquired position as Director of the Hamburg Art Museum (Kunsthalle). His grandiose aim was to create a new German culture radiating from the Hamburg Art Museum to all parts of the country. His first speeches, which he delivered to groups of prominent Hamburg citizens in the following months, reveal clearly that his ideas were fully formed at the outset of his venture. To the execution of these ideas, he had decided to devote his life's work.

“All that has happened to you,” an English friend wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is also connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people; and in this respect I do not think that the writings of Caesar and Tacitus can be more interesting to a true judge of human nature and society.” Indeed, the story of Franklin's life has mythic sweep and significance. The son of a soap boiler who stood before kings, a runaway apprentice printer who became minister plenipotentiary, Franklin had a career of constant change and discontinuity. His mobility—intellectual, geographical, social—would have staggered a less resilient man.

Aid to the “suffering south,” especially educational aid, was the concern of many groups after the Civil War. Alongside the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Yankee schoolmarms was the Peabody Education Fund, first of the major educational foundations in this country. After the soldiers, agents, and missionaries had gone, the Peabody Fund remained an influence upon southern education for nearly fifty years.

Since Schleiermacher there has been little agreement as to the authenticity of the Alcibiades Major. Taylor, for example, doubts that Plato wrote the dialogue because of its language, its colorless portrayal of Alcibiades, and the textbook character of its substantive elements, and an impressive list of scholars seem to agree, although perhaps for different reasons. While fewer individuals—especially Friedlander and Vink—accept the dialogue as genuine, they at least have the ancient weight of Olympiodorus, Proclus, and Plutarch behind them. Perhaps the most interesting view to be presented in recent years is that of Clark who, in a heroic effort at compromise, ascribes the first two thirds of the dialogue to a student of Plato and the final part to Plato himself. Presumably the bulk of the dialogue is ascribed to a non-Platonic source since the majority of commentators question its authenticity, but I find Clark's position unconvincing, especially when she suggests that it was Plato's “usual affection for his pupils and associates” that prompted him to finish the work when the student died.

Historians of ancient education have been speculating about the enrollment in Isocrates' school. While enrollment can hardly be taken as a critical historical datum—and evidence supporting even the best opinions on the subject is not too good—these speculations may bring to light some little-known dimensions to Isocrates' basic teaching method. If Isocrates were teaching as many as 100 students a year, his pedagogy should not have been the same as if he taught only 100 students during his entire career. Freeman believes that Isocrates had a huge school attracting an annual clientele of 100 students; Isocrates himself speaks of having had more pupils than all the other schools combined. Marrou, on the other hand, describes the Isocratic school as an elite institution supplying an academic adventure of rare quality to carefully selected and highly motivated persons. Is there any way of illuminating these divergent views since apparently they cannot be reconciled?

When Clarence D. Kingsley collapsed and died on the stairs of Cincinnati's old Central Union Station, the last day of the year 1926, little note was paid him as an educator. He had been chairman of the N.E.A. Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (henceforth the C.R.S.E.) and in that position the driving force behind the most significant educational document of the age, “The Cardinal Principles Report.” But this seemed all but forgotten. His hometown newspaper, The Syracuse Herald, identified him as a “school engineer” and the local Cincinnati paper called him a “consulting engineer” in the obituary columns.

Samuel Keimer suffered the misfortune of having had his sole surviving historical portrait drawn by a caricaturist. The medium of caricature utilizes a technique of selective accentuation; one or another of the subject's features or attributes are presented so much larger than life that they totally dominate the whole and effectively submerge, or at best adumbrate, all the others. The portrait of Keimer, the preservation of which is due solely to the fame of its creator rather than its subject, was penned by a hand that had completely mastered this technique as an instrument for its own purposes. The artist in question was Benjamin Franklin, and the portrait of Samuel Keimer achieved a modicum of immortality due to its inclusion in Franklin's Autobiography.

If ever there was an opportunity, in the history of American education, to create “a school in which all good things come together,” it seemed to exist in Chicago in 1898. At least it seemed so to Colonel Francis W. Parker who, in that year, described his hopes for just such a school. Colonel Parker had, during the preceding twenty years, earned national recognition for his reforms in elementary education and teacher training in the Quincy, Massachusetts, public schools and the Cook County and Chicago normal schools. Sympathetic professional colleagues applauded his pedagogical innovations and looked to him for continued leadership in the “new education” movement. Others, however, judged his revolutionary ideas quite differently. Certain influential Chicago laymen, advocates of “economy and efficiency” in the public schools, regularly denounced both Parker and his practices and sought repeatedly for his dismissal. His national reputation, it appeared, was more secure than the future of “the work,” as he called it, to which he had dedicated himself. It was this mixture of commendation and condemnation, the chronic threat to his work coupled with his near-religious commitment to carry it forward, that prompted him to write of his hopes and fears to Mrs. Emmons Blaine.

The reverend Benjamin Trumbull has generally been overshadowed by his more renowned relatives. His father's first cousin was Jonathan Trumbull, the Revolutionary War governor of Connecticut whose son, John, became one of America's most distinguished artists. Yet, notwithstanding such illustrious kinsmen, Benjamin Trumbull's long and diversified career also formed a prominent part of New England's past. He was born in Hebron, Connecticut, on December 19, 1735, and in his adult years served as both a chaplain and a soldier during the American Revolution, wrote a noteworthy history of colonial Connecticut, and, for sixty years prior to his death in 1820, he often influenced the religious atmosphere in his native state from his Congregational pulpit in North Haven. In all these differing roles, Benjamin Trumbull, like many of his well-known contemporaries, felt the durable effects of a colonial higher education.

Historians and educators have frequently overlooked the significant contributions made to modern education by the French Revolution. It is accepted that the upheavals of 1789 and the years following caused profound changes in the political and social development of Western man—even in his economic, cultural, and religious development. Yet even such a distinguished and respected historian of education as Adolphe Meyer feels that in the field of education the French revolutionaries effected few significant changes. “What they actually accomplished beyond the robust exercise of their arms and larnyx was very little,” concludes Meyer.

Many questions have long shrouded the nature and extent of colonial New England's effort in education. Samuel Eliot Morison, a recognized authority on New England history, has remarked that “for want of records there is still much obscurity in the educational history of colonial New England.” In spite of the scarcity of town records, a controversy has reigned for some time over how well the early school laws were enforced, how good the schools that were established may have been, and the extent of religion's role in education. Some historians, Professor Morison included, have seen in the efforts of Puritan New England a legitimate and positive influence respecting education. Others, including some professors of education, have tended to criticize colonial New England's educational program for being too religious in nature and too narrow in scope.

Although the relation between the public schools and the public is one of the persistent themes in American educational debate, the character of this relation is far from self-evident. In part, the problem lies in the two broad styles of discussion concerning the publicness of public education: The public is sometimes viewed as a whole, as the raison d'être, source of virtue, mainstay of support (or rightful mainstay which sometimes withholds its support) for the public schools; and sometimes the public is viewed in a fragmented fashion, as a series of groups, either totally comprising the public or over and against the public as a whole. This second conception is particularly prominent in the puzzled and defensive rhetoric of educators who see the public school as a citadel under constant attack from a series of pressure groups.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Columbia College in the city of New York emerged as a modern university. Years of reform agitation culminated in major innovations: a graduate school of political science, Barnard College for women, Teachers College, expanded library facilities, and revised governing statutes. These changes reflected not merely national trends, though the obvious successes of Johns Hopkins and Harvard played important roles, but also the confluence of a number of features particular to Columbia. New faculty members—most importantly John Burgess—arrived with training from the research-oriented German universities. The governing board of trustees began, for the first time, to reflect New York's commercial and internationally oriented classes. Similarly, a generation of post-Civil War liberal arts graduates, having found their classical education inadequate to industrial America, now provided organized pressure for curriculum reform and more advanced studies. But underlying these, were two and a half decades of agitation by Columbia's President F. A. P. Barnard for a university not a college—twenty-five years of hope and frustration.

The early history of Indian education in the United States reveals an arresting segment of the continuing, current controversy between church and state over the use of tax funds for the support of religious schools. In the history reviewed below, church and state not only stood toe to toe but also “eyeball to eyeball.” The degree to which either stepped back or blinked is subject to an interpretation of the consequences which are not all in yet. This brief history of federal support of religious Indian schools is not only important in itself, but perhaps something is to be learned from the scars of battle by those involved in the struggle today.

The british army, one of the most conservative institutions in Victorian England, smugly resisted military reforms after the defeat of Napoleon I by the Duke of Wellington in 1815. Not until the crisis of the Crimean War (1854-1856) did England even consider improving her corroded Army which was now struggling desperately to maintain an invasion foothold at Sebastapol in Russia's Crimean Peninsular. Only then, and under a torrent of public criticism, did the Army initiate improvements that were characteristic of the age of reform. Typical of these reforms were experiments in education that would elevate the status of the lowly enlisted man and raise his degree of literacy.

Sociologists are becoming reacquainted with history. Some seek in broad patterns of national development an understanding of social growth and decay. Others detail processes of social change from the minute data of local history. Although these scholars draw their materials from the past, they do not work as social historians. Their primary aim is not to illuminate the periods or places that they study but to move beyond particular data, using them to test or generate propositions of more general applicability.

Much of this work centers on the development and stabilization of the national state, and American sociologists, especially, are keenly interested in the conditions for the emergence of durable political democracy. In research of this kind, one's attention falls naturally upon arrangements for schooling, for it is often argued that political stability, especially in democracies, rests on the extension of common education.

It is common knowledge that the history of education is regarded by many who direct the destiny of the curriculum in teacher-education institutions as a very impractical, antiquarian, and uninteresting subject which has managed to hang on by sufferance and which is now either being fused with the more functional foundation fields, forced out entirely, or taught by scholars in general history. No attempt will be made to assess all these allegations; rather, it will be shown that the charge of impracticality has been grossly overstated. The following case study will illustrate how the historical method of research was recently applied to a problem in the very practical area of finance.

Human motivation is at best difficult to fathom, especially since “complex” and “ambivalent” man is frequently conditioned by multiple factors and motivated by many and often disparate considerations. The task is further complicated when one attempts to assess the motivational factors that induce a person to act one way instead of another in a particular situation.

In background, temperament, and intellectual proclivities Herbert Spencer epitomizes some of the most salient features of Victorianism and the Victorian age. Brought up in a middle-class Nonconformist family, he retained, and often felt impious delight in stressing, many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century English Philistinism, namely, a “hedgehog-like independence,” a reaction to traditional views about religion, education, and morality, an aversion to authority and orthodoxy, and a puritan-like austerity with its contempt for “the pleasures and graces of life.” Like so many of the eminent Victorians at home and abroad, Spencer was a man of remorseless energy, who reveled at his Olympian propensity to grapple with huge questions about the cosmos, man, and society. His prodigious intellectual output (William James called Spencer the “philosopher of vastness”) was a blending of what he perceived to be “scientific” reasoning about organic, inorganic, and superorganic development or evolution, with strong ideological overtones.