Charity students at New England colleges before 1800 always had depended on individual patrons and small institutions to provide the kind of financial assistance which more fortunate students received from their families. Every year a few orphans and impoverished young men who had distinguished themselves as village scholars were sent to college as wards of prominent townspeople or as beneficiaries of their church charity funds. Since most patrons and churches could support only one or two students at irregular intervals, the scale of patronage in the eighteenth century had made it possible to think of student aid in familial terms: patrons, churches, local charitable societies, and even college officials—who rarely had funds to offer—all assumed an intimate, paternal watchfulness over these adopted sons. The rise of the American Education Society after 1815 altered these old assumptions. No longer did indigent students depend solely upon small sources of charity in their own communities, or experience the kind of paternal watchfulness that had always accompanied the charity they received, for they could turn instead to an institution too large to function like a family. As the number of A.E.S. beneficiaries climbed toward 1,000, totally new arrangements for student aid appeared, transforming the situation of indigent students in the nineteenth century, creating an organization of unprecedented size and influence over the American student population.

The numbers of native young men who began flooding American cities in the 1840s and 1850s were faced with a bewildering array of problems. Opportunities they had been led to believe were available for the asking appeared more difficult to lay hands on. Employers were unexpectedly reluctant to hire them and they themselves began to realize how unsure they were about what they wanted to do in a strange environment.

During the 1840s and 1850s the transformation of schoolkeepers into a professional corps of educators hinged more on the efficiency of contemporary revivalist strategies than on any conception of scholarship or systematic pedagogy. At best, theories and ideologies of instruction generally offered only supplementary argumentation to justify immediate practices and experiments. Little educational activity seems to have been inspired directly by any ideological treatises on learning, although professional schoolmen of the ante-bellum period freely invoked Pestalozzi, de Fellenberg, Rousseau, Lancaster, and the European educational systems as models of various educational practices. In New England the effective plan behind the call for professional educators came not from adaptations of foreign instruction, but rather from already proven measures which had been applied and perfected by religious evangelicals of the 1830s. The major institution for educational improvement in the ante-bellum period was the teachers' institute which operated as a kind of revival agency. The origin, spread, and eclipse of this institution for professional teachers, both in its conceptual and institutional features, illuminate the shifting contours of educational policy and practice in New England before the Civil War.

Biography, if it is done well, reveals to the reader the subject's times as well as the details of his life. Institutions are what men make them, and as men are influenced by their past and by their circumstances, any understanding of an institution's development must be made from a knowledge of the interplay of man and institution, society and man. These excellent biographies of two eighteenth-century presidents of Yale present a vivid picture of academic education and an insight into the social and intellectual world two centuries ago. The scene is at once antique and familiar; it is as though one were to find in a collection of Hanoverian portraits the face of a friend. Wars, student tumults, graffiti, “irrelevance” of curricula, desperate need for endowment, fights with the state legislature, all of this was as much a part of colonial and federal college life as it is in the current time. One finishes these two volumes endowed with a knowledge of the past and an insight into the present.