Opposition to school vaccination requirements has a long history in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to today. This essay identifies three distinct phases in organized resistance to school vaccination in the United States between 1827 and 1929. This resistance was associated with a rise in anti-science discourse among leaders of the national anti-vaccination societies and occurred within the context of broader social changes and scientific discoveries during this period.

Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during the civil rights era—desegregating schools and arresting white flight—were decisively wedded to notions of parental choice, academic selectivity, and urban revitalization. While magnet schools enacted innovative curricula in self-consciously multicultural spaces, their scarcity, combined with their function as a spur to middle-class urbanism, ratified new regimes of inequality in urban education. This article frames magnet schools’ engineered success as a necessary prehistory for the rise of educational choice-and-accountability reforms later in the twentieth century.

In 1981, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first school district in America to replace its neighborhood schools with a “controlled choice” assignment plan, which considered parental preference and racial balance. This article considers the history preceding this decision to explore how and why some Americans became enamored with choice-based assignment at the expense of the neighborhood school in the late twentieth century. It argues that Cambridge's problematic experience with open enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s created a vocal, consumer-oriented, and politically active class of parents who became accustomed to choice and, by the early 1980s, dependent on its benefits. Moreover, controlled choice proved especially attractive in this university community because Cambridge had a constituency of well-educated, middle-income parents who possessed the social capital to identify the best educational opportunities for their children, but lacked the economic capital to use real estate to gain access to their preferred schools.

Emma Willard's map-drawing geographic pedagogy revolutionized early nineteenth-century American education, turning students into participants in the crafting of the new nation. This essay explores the conditions under which map drawing was transported to American missionary schools in South Asia and helped instigate a Tamil nation in British Ceylon. What did the missionaries intend the teaching method to impart? What were the consequences of this pedagogical form on dominant Tamil portrayals of space and identity in Ceylon? To answer these questions and to track the foreign career of American didactic mapmaking, this essay draws on print and manuscript archival materials, including two maps by a Tamil student at the American Ceylon Mission named Robert Breckenridge. The essay argues that the use of map-drawing pedagogy in Ceylon partially transmitted American ways of being in the world, which were consequential for local spatial knowledges and the crafting of a Tamil national identity on the island.

Two separate school districts—a city one and a county one—operated independently in Durham, North Carolina, until the early 1990s. The two districts merged relatively late compared to other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh and Charlotte. In Durham, residents in both the county and city systems vehemently opposed the merger until the county commissioners ultimately bypassed a popular vote. African American advocates in the city school district, in particular, faced an impossible trade-off: city schools increasingly struggled financially because of an inequitable funding structure, but a merger would significantly threaten fair racial representation on the consolidated school board. This article explores this core tension in historical context by looking at several failed merger attempts from 1958 to 1988, as well as the 1991 merger implementation, against the backdrop of desegregation, economic transition, profound metropolitan changes, and protracted political battles in Durham.

Progressive education swept across Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century, restructuring schools, introducing new courses, and urging teachers to reorient the classroom to the interests and needs of the learner. The women religious who taught in Vancouver's Catholic schools negotiated the revised public school curriculum, determined to utilize the latest methods and meet public school standards in hopes of receiving government funding. But they were equally adamant about preserving Catholic beliefs regarding human life and resisting “false” philosophy. Despite their caution, progressive education began to transform Catholic pedagogy in this period, most notably in religious education. Looking back over the decades, Catholic educators in the early 1960s would observe that progressive education had brought about a shift in schools that emphasized process over content and self-expression over discipline. They found themselves questioning whether the curriculum undermined revealed knowledge by overemphasizing empirical science as the foundation for all knowledge.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, dozens of experimental colleges were founded across the United States. While these institutions are usually remembered as either a fringe movement of the 1960s or a niche for nonconformist students, this essay argues that their genesis was markedly mainstream. Drawing from popular trends, higher education leaders in the late 1950s designed the institutions to be the most efficient means of educating a rapidly growing population into an open-minded, liberally educated citizenry. Despite initial growth, by the end of the 1960s, rifts emerged between students and experimental college leaders. These conflicts, combined with a broader loss of material and ideological support, led the movement to lose its legitimacy as a mainstream reform. By highlighting the history of experimental colleges, this essay prompts a reconsideration of this movement's importance and its connections to larger trends in undergraduate and general education in the mid-twentieth century.

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a “negro” as a teacher of “white youths.” Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual elite in exercising the political power they held under Radical Reconstruction to strip racial designations from public schools. White supremacist Redeemers responded with a vicious propaganda campaign to define, differentiate, and diminish the “negro race.” Edmunds navigated the shifting landscape of race in the New Orleans public schools first as a student and then as a teacher, and the details of his life show the impact on ordinary Afro-Creoles as the city's warring politicians used the public schools both to undermine and reinforce the racial order.

This article examines the impact of African American migration into Kansas City, Missouri, on the city's segregated school system in the 1940s and early 1950s. Substantial increases in the number of African American elementary school-age children produced chronic overcrowding in the segregated black schools, which was not easily relieved due to the legal requirement to operate racially segregated schools. In order to address the crowding, the school district was compelled on four occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s to convert an entire school from white use to African American use. In each case, the school district took the symbolic step of changing the name of the school so that it was clearly identifiable as a school for African American students. The school district's practice of renaming schools coded those schools by race and further signaled that the surrounding area had become a black neighborhood.

Around 1940, the Southern Association Study in Secondary Schools and Colleges and the Secondary School Study of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes implemented cooperative educational experimentation in the American South. This was a progressive education method for improving schools exemplified in the national Eight-Year Study. The research detailed here reconstructs the work of the two southern studies as it occurred in tandem and in connection with the Eight-Year Study and the General Education Board. The white Southern Study utilized the progressive cooperative study as a clinical technique largely divorced from democratic ideals. The black Secondary School Study leveraged the progressive cooperative study as a means to democratize African American education in the South. The findings reported here confirm and complement conclusions in the historiography of African American education, extend historical perspectives on the Eight-Year Study, and contribute to an understanding of how progressive education was interpreted and translated into practice.

The reasons for peer education's ascendance as a core pedagogy in sex education are as much historical as they are reasonable or ethical. This article traces the history of peer-led sex education from the 1970s to the 1990s against the backdrop of New York City's financial ruin, social unrest, and a public health crisis. Starting with an analysis of the Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education's Peer Information Project, founded in 1974, it investigates the application of new pedagogical techniques, the interplay between pedagogy and bureaucracy, and the transformation of school culture. Peer education thrived when educators and activists agreed that young people were more likely to accept advice from other young people, a reasonable contention that was nonetheless underassessed. Yet peer education's least intriguing attribute proved to be its most important characteristic: it could be quickly and inexpensively enacted. When HIV/AIDS began to decimate New York City's adolescent population, and the Board of Education proved slow and contradictory in its actions, the city turned to peer education, henceforth coupling the concepts of sex education and peer education.

The essay reinterprets the 1845–1847 pamphlet war between Emma Willard and Marcius Willson, authors of popular history schoolbooks. Willson publicly attacked the accuracy and literary quality of history schoolbooks by eight leading authors, with particular attention to Willard's, just as he was publishing his first school history. Willard and Willson practiced different kinds of history authorship that reflected their different backgrounds, intellectual milieus, and professional circumstances. This essay questions conventional readings of the debate and argues that their subsequent exchange over plagiarism, style, and sourcing illuminated important issues in the purposes of history education, the challenges of growing markets, and new theories of historiography. The debate showed that schoolbooks were not simply derivative “guardians of tradition,” but that they could be portals for new disciplinary theories in an age without a robust professional research infrastructure to test and filter them.

Stanford University's indirect cost rates for federally sponsored research dramatically increased from 58 percent in 1980 to 78 percent in 1991. Faculty frustration with increasing rates and scrutiny from a zealous government contracting officer culminated in a congressional inquiry into Stanford's indirect cost accounting practices in 1990 and 1991. The investigation revealed controversial luxury expenses charged to the government, including a yacht and antiques for the Stanford president's home, which attracted extensive public attention. Stanford president Donald Kennedy admitted some expenses were accounting errors but defended many expenses as permissible under government rules. Stanford's aggressive overhead recovery practices represent the institution's struggle to adapt to a changing economy for sponsored research in the twilight of the Cold War. The congressional response, which included a cap on administrative cost recovery for all universities, highlighted how shifting federal priorities—from defense research to deficit reduction—strained the relationship between the federal government and academic science.