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.

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.

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.

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.”