In recent years, biographical interviews with former pupils have become important sources for boarding school history. This raises the question as to whether these retrospective sources can be combined with contemporary written material and how to go about that. This paper argues for a triangulation of written with oral sources and the related…

There is no doubt that the first boarding school in the South Sami region in Norway (1910-1951) was authoritarian and contributed to Sami assimilation over several generations. Descriptions given by a former student regarding the poor conditions 70 years after he felt he was the victim of abuse is perhaps a sign of growing self-awareness among the…

August Heißmeyer was a high-ranking SS officer, a member of Heinrich Himmler's inner circle, husband to Reich women's leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, and the driving force behind the pan-European expansion of Nazi elite schools during the Third Reich. In light of Heißmeyer's official pardon by Württemberg state president Dr Gebhard Müller in 1951,…

This article explores elite international education in the late twentieth century through the case of the Leysin American School (LAS), an international boarding school in Switzerland. From LAS's founding in 1961 to its re-branding in 2011, broader geopolitical and economic frameworks shifted from a period dominated by the Cold War to one informed…

Despite a visual turn in the field of history of education, including visual sources has far from become standard practice when writing histories of education or when considering children's voices from the past. Yet photographs can be especially fruitful when considering marginalised children who left few traces in other records. Building upon…

This article focuses on an underexplored aspect of the Catholic convent school experience, namely the kinds of socialisation and regulation of emotion maintained within the convent community. Drawing on the emerging history of emotions and the concept of emotional communities first posited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, it considers how historians might…

This article reveals that, contrary to common knowledge, schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in British Columbia -- Canada's westernmost province -- was not strictly segregated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Officially, government policy stipulated that Indigenous children should attend separate day and…

Extracurricular activities such as sports and music offer a means to glimpse the complexity of students' experiences in federally-run boarding schools for Native children in the United States. Studies of music in residential schools typically include a mix of quantitative and qualitative sources, including "unexpected archives" such as…

This article examines the responses of former Nazi elite school staff to the pressures of denazification. Teachers of the National Political Education Institutes, known as Napolas for short--boarding schools for the Third Reich's racial elite--were especially affected by the purge of National Socialist supporters from positions of influence, due…

This paper examines the role of place in the reform efforts of two teachers who established Miss White's Home School in Concord, Massachusetts (USA). Flora and Mary White rebelled against the prevailing industrial model of instruction in tax-supported schools where they taught. As a solution, they moved to Concord--a nonconformist town with a…

This paper assesses the origins, conclusions and consequences of the Fleming Committee, which considered the relationship between Britain's leading independent boarding schools and the state. In 1944, the committee recommended one-quarter of the places at these schools should be assigned to a national bursary scheme for children who might benefit…

This paper examines recently discovered photographs of Arizona Indian schools. The amateur snapshots were drawn from a personal album of about 150 photographs collected by a woman who apparently worked at the Pima Indian school in Sacaton. The name of the woman who made the album and sketchy captions is unknown, handwritten on the front or back…

Focuses on the construction of lay sisters in a religious order and school setting using a poststructuralist orientation. Explains that in the study documents were examined and interviews were conducted with ex-students, choir nuns, and a lay sister at a small Catholic girls-preparatory boarding school. Explores the narrative of one lay sister.…

Investigates the establishment of ragged schools in nineteenth century Wales. States they dealt with the many shabbily clad, underprivileged youth found roaming the streets. Explains Wales focused on creating church and boarding schools. Concludes that other schools eventually provided welfare based services which caused ragged school's demise.…

Presents an overview of six years into research of Maori girls' schooling in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the role of education in the formation of their national identity. Focuses on the research methodology associated with the discovery of the documents and narratives on which the research is based. (CMK)