Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.

In June 1948, Wisconsin Superior Court Judge Roy H. Proctor sentenced four University of Wisconsin students to one year probation for “participating in abnormal sexual activities.” The four students were among a group of twelve men on and off campus who had been arrested by city and university police. Their sentence was mild, given that the judge could have put them in prison for up to five years. Judge Proctor warned them that if there was a second offense, they should not expect leniency. “Each and all of you should feel deeply ashamed,” Proctor told them; “your conduct has caused an indelible mark to be placed against you. Certainly you will have to watch your step in the future, not only to avoid becoming second offenders, but to allay all suspicions of your becoming involved again.” Indeed, when one of the young men tried to move on with his life, university administrators made sure that the “indelible mark” followed him.

“The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment,” stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare “pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists.” This statement reveals some of the vocational options for women that were concomitant with the increased popularity of music and art education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Practical vocational concerns, along with notions of refinement and respectable entertainment, all were aspects of the impetus for music and art education. Preparing young women for occupations, whether as teachers of art and music or as commercial artists or musicians, was a particularly prominent component of education for women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

Immediately after the American Revolution, the founders set about the task of ensuring the continued existence of the fledgling republic. Facing a host of problems—economic, social, and governmental—some founders promoted a concept of schooling that would inculcate patriotism and forge a uniquely American identity. Noah Webster wanted to create an American language, and Benjamin Rush wanted schools to “convert men into republican machines.” Webster, Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others all wanted to use some version of common schooling to instill in children a sense of nationalism. Textbooks used in these common schools would be a likely way to further promote a sense of American identity. What that identity should be, though, and what the “good citizen” of the new republic should look like, was sharply contested, and textbooks of this period reflect many of the fissures in the work of nation building.

Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested to her that a “triumph of reason over the passions” might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, “I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings. … In this I can make no distinction of sex” [italics in original]. Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that males and females were both rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs.