Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This article contributes to previous histories of the NYA by demonstrating how its decentralized implementation empowered local college officials who jeopardized the program’s needs-based intent. Meanwhile, this localized administration also facilitated the NYA’s unusual and relatively successful support for Black college students.

After the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, student counseling services at the University of Texas (UT) were redesigned around a framework of psychopathology that attempted to prevent future violence through speculative assessments of dangerousness, or the capacity to harm oneself or others. This article explores how UT’s leadership and Texas politicians marshaled the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology to restore a sense of safety on campus despite their inability to accurately assess threats of violence. As a result, updates to the counseling center led to an escalation of campus surveillance, increased pressures on students and faculty to conform to UT’s values, and a proliferation of guns in the hands of campus police. The cost of attempting to eliminate danger by expanding mental health care at UT was an environment of heightened security and control that had questionable impact on campus safety and student mental health.

The historiography of African American education has stressed the work of education professionals, tensions over curricula, and the desegregation of schools. Informal learning settings, while recognized as important educative spaces, have remained tangential to the broader narrative of the struggle for education. Thus, the influence of Black civic voluntary organizations is largely underexplored. In this essay I posit that instead of being on the margins, Black associations supplemented, guided, supported, and funded the education of African Americans through overlapping organizational networks that comprised autonomous counterpublic spaces. In these spaces, a wide variety of voluntary groups worked collaboratively to improve local public schools, to develop curricula centered on Black culture, and to provide educational opportunities for youth and adults. Recognizing that the history of African American education cannot be fully told without investigating informal spaces, this essay offers a roadmap for the investigation of Black civic voluntary organizations.

This article examines the role of playing Indian in the development of progressive education in the U.S at the turn of the twentieth century. Experiential education provided an important incubator for a particular type of playing Indian, what I dub pedagogical playing Indian. The site of this analysis is the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, overseen by John Dewey from 1896 to 1904. Here Indian play aligned linear historicism and genetic psychology with Dewey’s emerging experimental method. The central role of Indian play was epitomized by the school’s history curriculum, where instructors encouraged students to imagine themselves as an Indian tribe through use of a sand table. In an ironic historical twist, Estelle Reel, superintendent of Indian Schools, then introduced the sand table and other Deweyan insights into federal Indian schools. This entanglement, effaced by the innocence of play, complicates the legacy of Dewey’s educational innovations with the dispossessive logic of Indian schooling.

This article examines cases of governors who established a foundation for school choice between 1980 and 1996. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to alleviate economic concerns and anxieties about desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled the values of the free market in deracialized ways and networked to pass comprehensive education reform grounded in neoliberal ideologies including individualism and competition.

This study analyzes 191 popular cultural artifacts referencing New Math and shows that broader cultural themes of the postwar era, including the urgent need and potential of technological progress, align with widespread beliefs about New Math. The analysis reveals that the public knew little about New Math and regarded it as a mysterious, powerful new technology that would empower the next generation. The study suggests that the public’s perceptions of New Math, and likely other educational reforms, were shaped in a social dialogue among producers and consumers of culture as much as by the content of those reforms.

This article traces the unique set of factors that allowed mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men. I argue that in the period 1850-1856, a window of opportunity offered a small group of women the chance to pursue medical education at the traditionally all-male regular Cleveland Medical College, at a time when medical training was inaccessible to women. A unique confluence of factors inspired this development, including a temporary fluidity of standards in medical training and practice, rising prospects for women’s access to higher education, the rapidly changing Cleveland urban environment and its progressive women’s network, and the College’s internal dynamics. The female graduates of the Cleveland Medical College joined a pioneer generation of women physicians in the mid-nineteenth-century US who chipped away at long-standing barriers limiting the role of women in medicine.

Drawing on a sample of seven students (three Black, four White) from schools in the North before the Civil War, this article examines how schooltime writing—compositions, letters, and diaries—helped young women navigate social expectations and assert intellectual agency. While Black and White students’ expressions reflected different positionalities, both critiqued confining ideals of domesticity. White students challenged assumptions that their futures lay only in the home as wives and mothers, while Black students reimagined their place in intellectual and civic life, articulating visions of liberation and belonging that confronted racism and sexism. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s framework of everyday negotiations of power and William Reddy’s concept of emotives, the article shows how affective writing worked as a subtle mode of social critique. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on women’s education and the history of emotions.

This forum contribution considers the complexities and importance of gender in the historiography of LGBTQ+ college students. After a brief introduction, we focus on four key areas in the existing historiography: women’s romantic relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education leaders’ enforcement of gender norms and purges of LGBTQ+ students through the mid-twentieth century, the gender dynamics within LGBTQ+ student organizations from the 1970s onward, and trans and other LGBTQ+ students’ expansion of gender possibilities, including through the use of drag. In so doing, we argue that gender analysis is important to the historiography of LGBTQ+ students, though most often that analysis has been implicit rather than explicit. Considering both the gaps in our historical knowledge and the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals, we contend that continued gendered analyses are not only warranted but also needed.

As a field, the history of education contains scant analyses of power, deprivation, or privilege from a white, patriarchal, or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself. This claim reflects that to some degree, gender is racialized and race is gendered. To support this contention, I discuss the small body of history of education scholarship that has interrogated white, masculine, and/or patriarchal power, highlighting in particular the work of feminist scholars of Color.1 I also underscore what we as a field might gain in analyzing masculine, patriarchal, and/or white power with the same fervor many pay to racially, ethnically, and sexually marginalized communities, pointing out some seminal works and figures that stand to be further enhanced by gendered or racial analysis. I end with questions that could inform research directions toward these ends.

This article traces the contours of the history of women’s education in England and Ireland in the period 1850-2000, mapping dominant themes and key inflection points. Positing a framework for reading degrees of change over time, we propose four interrelated lenses: access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks. Drawing on key contributions to the field, we argue that women’s engagement with higher education has followed a complex and uneven trajectory, reflective of the shifting sands of attitudes and accommodations toward women across time, space, and discipline.

This essay reflects on my research and teaching on the history of gender and education, specifically with respect to the schooling history of Chinese women in the colonial world. In doing so, it aims to propose an alternate way of seeing the silent and missing figures in the colonial archives: the subordinated, marginalized, feminine colonial subjects. Commonly framed as orphaned, wounded, and diseased bodies in the historical research on the colonial era, these women were rendered as part of the “problem” that the colonial government ought to fix. It was through “them,” the disenfranchised Chinese females, that the missionary and the colonial state found their meaning and purpose. By the early twentieth century, although Chinese women’s education in the colonial context shifted from a discourse of evangelization to one of modernization, the function of women’s schooling remained constant: The feminine figure was still a platform through which the colonial government projected much of its civilizing ambition and desires for modernity. However, if one reads beyond the colonial archives and the paradigm of colonial subject as “recipient” and focuses instead on the archives of everyday life, one can see Chinese feminine figures as the triumphant masters of modern life. This essay traces this paradigm shift and argues that “gender” is an analytical tool capable of unearthing the hidden figures of modernity.