This article considers Australian receptions of C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" (1959), and of the controversy over the literary critic F. R. Leavis's combative 1962 response to it. Taking a lead from conceptual insights in global histories of science and the history of knowledge, the paper considers the…

The History Workshop movement took its stance on the democratisation of history making, becoming notorious for its exuberant gatherings and impassioned "histories from below". At the centre of the early Workshop was the British historian Raphael Samuel, who has been described as the personification of its intellectual and ethical…

In 1927 the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) established Crosby Hall in London as a hall of residence for women graduates from overseas. The Federation aimed to foster international understanding and peace at a time of social and political turmoil. Accessions to the library at the Hall were on a somewhat ad hoc basis and provide an…

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least...I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and "A" levels, there was almost a sense…

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades following 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning.…

Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only adult residential college, was founded in the 1930s by Philip Kerr, 11th Marquis of Lothian. This paper traces the debates concerning the college and the rationale for adult residential education until the 1950s, focusing on the difficulties that Newbattle faced in establishing itself as a central part of…

The essay focuses on curriculum history as the study of systems of reason. The first section considers curriculum as "converting ordinances", inscribing Puritan notions of education as evangelizing and calculating designs in American Progressive education. The second section examines the Social Question, a cross-Atlantic Protestant reformist…

UK-based teacher educators formed the core membership of the History of Education Society when it was founded in 1967, and they were frequent early contributors to the Society's journals. Given these origins, one might imagine that the history of teacher education would have featured more prominently in the pages of the first 40 volumes of the…

In 1898, students at the University of Toronto founded "Torontonensis", the university's first yearbook. Fashioned as a remembrance of university, from its inception the yearbook was fraught with conflict and contestation particularly around how male students were represented and how their college experiences were made, and not made,…

This article analyses the introduction and, later on, reconstruction of compulsory school technology in Sweden 1975-1995. It focuses on two curricular reforms and different attempts to increase the legitimacy of technology as a school subject. The article builds upon theories from science studies and the term boundary-work is used to analyse the…

The influential policy work in education of the intellectual grouping formed by J. H. Oldham during the Second World War known as "Oldham's Moot" (1938-1947) has been discussed in recent publications. These have noted its general educational and university policy, its intellectual strengths, and the role of Sir Walter Moberly in relation to his…

The Museum of Irish Industry in Dublin, in its short existence (1845-1867) facilitated the access of ordinary people to popular scientific education, became a "cause celebre" and was defended by popular protest when the government recommended its abolition in 1862. Its Director, Sir Robert Kane (1809-1890) was not only an advocate of…

The Carnegie Corporation found its first great manager in Frederick Paul Keppel (1875-1943). Keppel's career is important to historians of education because interwar Carnegie initiatives, articulated through the Corporation's Dominions and Colonies Fund and Teachers College, Columbia University, internationalised American educational theories and…

This paper compares the founding of the elementary school systems of Ireland and Ontario in the nineteenth century. The systems shared a common set of textbooks that had originated in Ireland. Using examples from a number of these books, which were part of a series that had been specially prepared for the Irish national school system, founded in…

In 1937, the Ministry of Education in Ontario published a document entitled "Programme of Studies for Grades 1 to VI of Public and Separate Schools" that became known amongst teachers as the "little gray book". The curriculum and pedagogy in the document enunciated a rupture or mutation in pedagogical discourse that broke with…