I want to start these remarks by thanking the members of the History of Education Society for the honor of electing me to serve as president and especially my colleagues—faculty and graduate students—at New York University who have made NYU such an extraordinarily collegial home to study the History of Education. Finally I want to say a word of gratitude to my own teacher and mentor, Lawrence A. Cremin, who introduced me to this field and guided my early work. In the course of these remarks, I will be critical of him at points, but Larry Cremin remains my role model as a teacher, scholar, and kind friend. I suspect I may be—though one never knows—the last of a long line of Cremin students to preside over HES. But I do so proudly.

During the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, public education was a significant battleground in the struggle for racial equality. As the courts ordered officials to dismantle a system of educational apartheid, whites resisted, bringing blacks and whites together in ways that disillusioned many African Americans. Hoping to transcend what he called “the trauma of desegregation,” in 1977, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt proposed that all students be required to pass a minimum competency test (MCT) to receive a high school diploma. Hunt was part of a generation of moderate New South politicians who crafted a new racially neutral educational discourse that emphasized accountability and achievement rather than equality and access. Capitalizing on the perception that the quality of education had declined, these New South moderates built biracial coalitions that established high school MCTs in every southern state by 1986, replacing a civil rights agenda of opportunity with an accountability agenda of individual student responsibility.

By the waning years of the 1940s America had lost much of what remained of its postwar optimism as fears of Communism came to dominate the national political conversation. Left-leaning citizens had particular cause for disillusionment as politicians continued to trample many vestiges of New Deal programs and ideals in their rightward trek. The passage of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace's abysmal failure at the polls in the 1948 election hammered more nails into the coffin of leftwing activism. What ultimately caused the Old Left to retreat from mainstream political discourse was, of course, the new ideological war that loomed on the horizon. While U.S. foreign policy focused on containing Communism abroad, local and federal governlnent agencies and civilian vigilante groups rallied to fight suspected communists at home, Government agencies and private organizations compiled lists of alleged subversives, such as Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television that the right-wing publication Counterattack released in 1950. The attacks on those in the media and government were well documented, as news sources reported the trials of iconic groups like the Hollywood Ten and televised the Army-McCarthy hearings. At the same time that anticommunists focused on rooting out subversives in the State Department, organized labor, and the entertainment industry, they also turned their attention to education. Many political leaders, both liberal and conservative, viewed education as the “key factor” in securing American victory in the Cold War; as a result, between the end of WWII and the 1960s, anticommunists devoted an unprecedented amount of scrutiny to public schools, administrators, and teachers.

Over two centuries after the invention of blackboards, they still feature prominently in many American classrooms. The blackboard has outlasted most other educational innovations and technologies, and has always been more than an aide memoire. Students and teachers have long assumed inscriptions on its surface made mental processes visible. As early as 1880, in fact, the A.H. Andrews & Co. catalog described the blackboard as a “mirror reflecting the workings, character, and quality of the individual mind.” The blackboard's ultimate origins are unclear but in North America one institution, the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, played a particularly important role in establishing the device within classrooms. The blackboard's use at West Point in the first years of the nineteenth century garnered the novel tool notice and by the Civil War, the blackboard's place had been so firmly established in American schools as to be easily overlooked in importance; it was simply part of the physical and intellectual architecture of the classroom, Subsequent changes in construction and production have affected cost and appearance, but the basic idea of a vertical surface on which erasable inscriptions are made has remained.