Of the many organizational changes that took place in public education in North America at the turn of the last century, few had greater impact on the school than the development of the principal. The creation of the principal's office revolutionized the internal organization of the school from a group of students supervised by one teacher to a collection of teachers managed by one administrator. In its very conception, the appointment of a school-based administrator who was authorized to supervise other teachers significantly restructured power relations in schools, realigning the source of authority from the classroom to the principal's office. Just as significant was the role that the principal played as a school based representative of the central educational office.

In 1738, the English evangelist George Whitefield traveled to the new colony of Georgia intending to establish “a house for fatherless children.” Inspired by both August Hermann Francke, the German Pietist who had great success educating and maintaining poor orphans in Halle, and by charity schools established in Great Britain, Whitefield's orphan house and charity school, named Bethesda, opened its doors early in 1740. For years, Whitefield devoted himself tirelessly to ensuring the success of the Bethesda school, preaching throughout Britain and North America on its behalf. Whitefield's preaching tour on behalf of his beloved Bethesda is well known for its role in catalyzing the religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening. The tour also marked an important shift in the history of education in America. News of the establishment of the orphanage at Bethesda coincided with new efforts to school the poor throughout the colonies. Drawing on both the British and German models of charity schooling that were highly influential for Whitefield, eighteenth-century Americans began or increased commitments to charity schooling for poor children. But the European models were not adopted wholesale. Instead, local administrators of the schooling experiments deviated from these models in a striking way. In America, elites offered some children the opportunity for extensive charity instruction, but not necessarily children at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This article will argue that the execution of these charity schooling programs was contingent upon local social conditions, specifically what appears to have been local elites' desire to maintain a certain social order and ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.

At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.” Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

Margaret Preston, a member of a prominent family from Lexington, Kentucky, attended Bryn Mawr College from 1904 to 1906, initially against her will. Letters between Margaret and her parents while she was away at school reveal a homesick young woman, at first uninterested in scholarship. She complained that the other girls were “ugly and look disagreeable” and that she had bags under her eyes because “Bryn Mawr is a warranted beauty-destroyer.” In her second year, however, as Margaret began to develop academically, she focused less on returning home, beauty, and boys and more on her classes. She ignored her mother's requests for her to leave Bryn Mawr early for Christmas vacation in order to attend a dance, because she would lose credit if she missed class. Although she had earlier told her mother that she would have preferred that her aunt fund a trip to Europe rather than her education at Bryn Mawr, she now suggested that if she stayed four years to complete her degree, she might have a chance to graduate with honors. Apparently, her aunt did not choose to extend her financial support because Margaret stayed only two years. However, she returned home to Lexington a more bold and self-confident woman.

World War II stands as a defining moment for American higher education. During the crisis of international relations that existed by the late 1930s, American thinkers of various stripes felt compelled to mobilize the country's intellectual and educational resources in defense of democracy, thus creating “a great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war.” The war aims of the United States—as enunciated in the Atlantic Charter and popular portrayals of the “good war” in which the United States fought to free the world from the grips of evil dictatorships—gave tremendous legitimacy to these efforts, which built into a national discussion on the goals of higher education. Between 1943 and 1947, at least five major reports on general education or liberal education appeared, three of which explicitly treated the relation of such education to “democracy” or “free society.”

Samuel Chapman Armstrong is well known for establishing Hampton Institute, the institution most involved with training black teachers in the South after the Civil War. It is less known that he was born in Hawai'i to the missionary couple Reverend Richard and Clarissa Chapman Armstrong. His parents were members of the Fifth Company of missionaries that arrived in Hawai'i in 1831. Reverend Armstrong withdrew from the mission in 1848 to become the Minister of Public Instruction. Until Reverend Armstrong's death in 1860, he was the major force behind education for Hawaiians in both missionary and public schools

Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois were two of the most prominent African-American educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, they both envisioned a broad education tailored specifically to the critical intellectual and vocational needs of the entire black community. They also participated in international affairs, attended and worked together at some of the same conferences and meetings, and shared a belief that education should encourage blacks to place their situation and struggles within a global context. In developing their educational ideas, they both addressed a wide range of educational issues (black women's education, education of the black masses, and the history curriculum in black schools) that spoke to the universal as well as the local realities of black life in America. At the core of their educational thought was their belief that social advancement would result in equality for blacks.

In a Brule Sioux legend, Iktome, the trickster, warns the various Plains tribes of the coming of the white man: “You are the Ikche-Wichasha—the plain, wild, untamed people,” he tells the Lakota, “but this man will misname you and call you by all kinds of false names. He will try to tame you, try to remake you after himself.” Iktome, in essence, describes the conflict that occurred when American Indians encountered Euro-Americans, who judged the Indians in relation to themselves and found the Indians lacking. Having already misnamed the people “Indians,” Euro-Americans proceeded to label them, among other things, “savages.” By the latter half of the nineteenth-century, such terms carried scientific meaning and seemed to propose to Americans that Native Americans, having “failed to measure up” to the standards of white society, were doomed to extinction unless they changed their ways, unless they were “remade.” And that was, indeed, the aim of American endeavors at Native American education, to remake or, in the words of Carlisle president Richard H. Pratt, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” These educational efforts at restructuring Native American lifestyles were more than the culmination of the battle over definitional control; they were precedents for future American imperial expansion as the United States discovered, at the turn of the century, that “Indians” also lived overseas and that, just like those at home, they needed to be properly educated in the American way of life. The United States' experience with American Indians thus provided both justification for overseas expansion, particularly into the Philippine Islands, and an educational precedent that would enable Americans to claim that their expansion was different from European imperialism based on the American use of education to transform the cultures of their subjects and prepare them for self-government rather than continued colonial control.

The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of postsecondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nation's campuses, taking advantage of a little heralded program to provide tuition and other benefits to veterans of the recently concluded World War II. As it turned out, both of these events signaled the beginning of a remarkable period of expansion in higher education. The postwar years have been described as the third great period of growth in the history of American education, a development that took decades to unfold. While the Commission suggested that nearly half of the nation's youth could benefit from collegiate education, it limited its projections to just thirteen years (to 1960). In fact, it took more than twice as long to approach such high levels of popular participation in higher education, and the most dramatic growth occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. In other respects, however, the President's commissioners' projections for change in enrollment patterns look remarkably prescient in retrospect. Even if they missed the timing of college growth and the significant role women played in it, their report still managed to anticipate a very broad process of change. By 1980 the collegiate student population had come to embody much of the inclusiveness and diversity that they had envisaged some thirty-three years earlier.

In 1930, the same year in which the segregationist Land Apportionment Act was passed, the governor of Rhodesia addressed a meeting of representatives from the various missionary organizations operating in the colony. He proceeded to argue against the sort of education that might create a class of African intellectuals who would eventually challenge white economic and political dominance:

In September 1830 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with some leaders of the Choctaw Nation. The treaty reinforced the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, which paved the way for the large-scale physical removal of tens of thousands of tribal people of the southeast, including many of the Choctaw. It provided for the “removal” of the Choctaw from their traditional homeland in Mississippi to Indian Territory. Over a two-year period, from 1831 to 1833, roughly thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand Choctaw, or about half of the tribe, moved to the region we now call southeastern Oklahoma

Whether it be my religion, my aesthetic taste, my economic opportunity, my educational desire, whatever the craving is, I find a limitation because I suffer from the greatest known handicap, a Negro — a Negro woman. (Mary McLeod Bethune, “Closed Doors,” 1936).

Despite widespread support for the postwar expansion of higher education, U.S. colleges and universities in the early 1950s were not isolated from broader social currents, and the deep social anxieties and political tensions of the Cold War found their way onto college campuses. In 1952, the University of California was still reeling from the loyalty oath controversy. In the late 1940s the University of California, like other universities nationwide, had been viewed with increasing suspicion by anti-Communist groups. The search for subversives in California institutions, spearheaded by the Tenney Committee of the California State Legislature, led the University of California's Board of Regents to add a disclaimer of membership in any organization advocating the overthrow of the United States to the oath of allegiance already required of faculty. In an atmosphere of rising hysteria about possible subversives and Communists in academia, on February 24, 1950, the Regents voted to fire anyone employed by the University of California who failed to sign the oath. This decision led to strong opposition from students and faculty. Despite these protests, and particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June, 1950, the Regents held firm. On August 25, 1950, thirty-one members of the University of California faculty were dismissed because they refused to sign the loyalty oath. None of them was accused of being a Communist or subversive. After an appellate court ruled against the Regents, in October 1951 the Regents voted to rescind the oath, but maintained their stance that the university would not employ Communists. Although the California Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the appellate court and the non-signers were reinstated to the university, the mood at the university, as in the nation as a whole, continued to be one of anxiety and unease.

In the decades following World War II, access to higher education became an important vehicle for expanding opportunity in the United States. The African American-led Civil Rights Movement challenged discrimination in higher education at a time when state and federal government leaders saw strengthening public higher education as necessary for future economic growth and development. Nationally, the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education report Higher Education for American Democracy advocated dismantling racial, geographic, and economic barriers to college by radically expanding public higher education, to be accomplished in large part through the development of community colleges. Although these goals were widely embraced across the country, in the South, white leaders rejected the idea that racial segregation stood in the way of progress. During the decades following World War II, white southern educational and political leaders resisted attempts by civil rights organizations to include desegregation as part of the expansion of public higher education.

Two weeks before the Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) broke for Christmas vacation in 1968, district secretary Alice Lupiano typed a phone memo for Superintendent Paul Cook: “Abusive telephone call at 1:00 p.m., 12/9/1968.” She matter-of-factly described the caller's death threats and allegations of her own promiscuity, and, before pulling the sheet from the roller, added a final line: “I didn't lose my cool.”