From the study of history, wrote Newton Edwards in 1949 in the first issue of History of Education Journal, “one may gain insight into the problems of one's own time and become more intelligent with respect to the shaping of future policy.” But, he continued, “if history is to achieve this purpose most effectively, it must … be regarded as a seamless web.” We can wholeheartedly agree with Edwards' affirmation of the usefulness of history of education. But if history is a “seamless web,” it is so only in theory. In practice, each of us must unravel the seamless web in our own way, based on our convictions, interests, and temperament, and hope that even this partial unraveling may still provide some insight into the educational problems of our time and some usefulness for the formulation of future policy.

Though the pressures for change had been building for some time, reform came suddenly to the Atlanta public school system. On May 28, 1897, in a City Council meeting ostensibly called to consider some routine matters pertaining to the city's water works, Alderman James G. Woodward introduced a resolution which replaced the sitting seventeen-member school board with a new board comprising one member from each of the city's seven wards. Despite a recent escalation in the level of conflict between the school board and Mayor Charles Collier, the move came as a complete surprise to virtually everyone in Atlanta, including all of the members of the school board. The entire operation took only a few minutes. As the Atlanta Constitution observed the next day:

When Stephan Thernstrom studied the children of laborers who lived in mid-nineteenth century Newburyport, Massachusetts, he made “a striking discovery.” The sons of those who had managed to purchase a home were less likely to be upwardly mobile. This finding, which at first sight seems so counterintuitive, Thernstrom explained in a manner that bears directly on the determinants of schooling in the nineteenth century:

Common sense suggests that youths from the thrifty, respectable, homeowning segment of the working class would develop higher ambitions than the children of laborers living at the bare subsistence level, and that they would possess superior resources in the contest for better jobs…. [But] the ordinary workman of nineteenth century Newburyport could rarely build up a savings account and purchase a home without making severe sacrifices. To cut family consumption expenditures to the bone was one such sacrifice. To withdraw the children from school and to put them to work at the age of ten or twelve was another. For the working class families of nineteenth century Newburyport, therefore property mobility did not usually facilitate inter-generational occupational mobility; often it was achieved by sacrificing the education of the younger generation.

In 1929 historian Willystine Goodsell noted the meager professional opportunities available to academic women. Only in the women's colleges did women professors of all ranks considerably outnumber the men. Goodsell concluded, “In the realm of higher education this is their one happy hunting ground and they make good use of it.” One such golden arena was the academic community of Wellesley College 1895–1920. Wellesley was the only women's college which from its founding in 1875 was committed to women presidents and a totally female professoriate. In the Progressive era this professoriate was a stellar cast: it included Katharine Coman, historian; Mary Calkins, philosopher; Vida Dutton Scudder, literary critic and social radical; Margaret Ferguson, botanist; Sarah Frances Whiting, physicist; Emily Greene Balch, economist; and Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. To outside observers this group had created a female Harvard, a “bubbling cauldron that seethed,” a “hotbed of radicalism.” To their students the noble faculty provided a rich world which stirred them. To the next generation of faculty women the “old crowd” were completely dedicated “war horses.” To each other, they were kindred spirits, diverse, but united in the “bonds of Wellesley.”