In Paris, at the great World's Exposition of 1900, thousands of observers from all nations marveled in fascination at the educational achievements of democracy heralded in the American Educational Exhibit. They drew around the special showcase for the high schools of Somerville, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Exhibited there were “interior and exterior views” of the Latin High School, a display of the English High School “in all its cosmopolitan branches from art to science, from studio to laboratory,” and a copy of a school yearbook. The American high school represented by Somerville became a symbol of the civilizing and technological progress of modern times celebrated by the world's fair. How the American high school developed a consequential role in social change, widely recognized in late industrial society, is the subject of this community study of Somerville.

Historians and sociologists possess only a preliminary understanding of the public high school's role in the forming of the industrial social order. This study, therefore, seeks to throw light on the function of the modern American high school in the currents of migration and social mobility generated by the industrial revolution. The high school served as a pathway for various social groups to white-collar and professional jobs. If so, did it serve to promote the formation of a middle class and to define its characteristics? Moreover, did it recruit the children of immigrants and manual workers into these forms of employment? This study reconstitutes the life courses of three generations of high school students to determine if John Goldthorpe's finding that education promoted the social mobility of British workers has an American parallel, or whether, as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued, schooling reinforced the social inequalities of capitalist society.