During the New Deal a new federal bureaucracy emerged as an important and problematic component in the history of policy making. The national emergency of the Depression began a sector-by-sector response to problems beyond the means of states or locales. This new role reversed a longstanding tradition of local initiative and state authority in democratic decision making, a tradition particularly cherished in the history of American public schools. Setting federal standards and procedures, particularly in areas where local leaders deemed it impolitic to act, produced consequences that some may have deemed necessary but which were not always predictable or desirable. By the 1960s politicians along the ideological spectrum recognized the political advantage of professional assessment and independent research into federal policy making. Particularly in education, so familiar yet so controversial, reliable and accurate knowledge would not only serve the needs of elected lawmakers; it would provide the legitimation for both the federal role and a new conception of enlightened citizenship.

During the past two decades scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia have significantly altered our understanding of the lives and work of women teachers. Qualitative data regarding this female workforce, including diaries, letters, and school records have yielded a fuller and richer portrait. Some quantitative work has supplemented this research, providing more information on the social class origins of teachers and their career trajectories. The typical teacher of the mid-nineteenth century was a young, unmarried, rural woman who stepped into one of the classrooms of the expanding public schools of the northeastern and midwestern United States. A quiet but significant revolution was taking place in the urban centers of the country during the nineteenth century, however, transforming whom taught and changing teaching into a career rather than a stopgap between family and marriage.

In 1997, the last school for girls over the age of twelve in the Netherlands was forced to close. There was no protest, not even from feminists. Considerable attention, but little regret, was shown in the media. Similarly, some thirty years earlier the abolition of the Middelbare Meisjesschool (the MMS)—the Dutch secondary school for girls—had provoked no serious protest. This article offers an historical explanation for the absence of either protest or regret. In order to do so, we will have to go back to the formative years of the Dutch secondary educational system, around 1900. While neighboring countries preferred separate instruction, the Dutch seem to have been at ease with girls and boys together in one classroom relatively early.

What we choose to read from the past matters enormously in how we assess history. Many of the most serious debates about the revolutionary and founding eras of the United States hinge on texts, and if some historians have revised their interpretations of American history it is in no small part due to the reevaluation of the relative importance of one set of writings against another. In the last three decades we have seen many texts move from background to foreground, from Bernard Bailyn's exhaustive study of revolutionary pamphlets which challenged the conventional wisdom that the revolution was an exclusively Lockean enterprise to Pauline Maier's recent look at the Declaration of Independence, situating that document in the context of the many, many declarations of independence put forward before July of 1776 and challenging prevailing assumptions about the intellectual influences on the colonies’ break with England. These endeavors reveal the human touch in historiography because it is always the decision of individual scholars to point our attention to recently discovered or newly reinterpreted texts.