In her published 1990 presidential address to the American History of Education Society, Maxine Schwartz Seller contends that much research on the history of education in the United States, including the history of women's education, “treats the nation as though its boundaries were impenetrable walls.” She poses the question: “What happens to the history of education in the United States—women's education in this case—when we see the United States not as a self-contained unit, but as part of an interconnecting, interacting North Atlantic, or Western hemisphere, or Pacific rim community of nations?”