Brian Simon (1915-2002), an influential Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, had been campaigning for comprehensive education from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, followed by a rapid expansion of comprehensive schools since the issue of Circular 10/65, comprehensive education was under attack by the Conservative…

In 2014, the Danish school system celebrated its 200-year anniversary with a five-volume publication entitled "Dansk skolehistorie gennem 500 år" (500 years of Danish school history). As editors-in-chief, we took our inspiration from the cultural turn within history more generally and the search for the black box of schooling among…

The COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of the 2020s not only marked a dramatic moment in world health, but also the start of manifold and entangled global crises that seem to define a watershed moment with severe effects on education. Pandemics we know are recurrent events. Faced with COVID-19 some historians have looked to previous pandemics to…

For historians studying socially and historically marginalised groups, archives of disciplinary institutions often contain a range of valuable sources, some of which are autobiographical in nature. However, when using these intimate sources, researchers must fulfil legal requirements to comply with various norms on privacy protection. This…

Through the lens of nineteenth-century Irish society and through an interrogation of the diaries of one of the first women professors appointed to the National University of Ireland, this article traces the entry of women into the professoriate in Ireland. The aim of the paper is to extend the map of the international research agenda which speaks…

Oral historians have declared the methodology a social justice project. This essay advances that discussion, positing that oral history methodology may represent a more specific "racial" justice project when coupled with critical race theory. An examination of the history of African American education scholarship, we argue, supports this…

This article -- the first part of a two-part contribution -- considers the current and past state of research on the history of adult education in Britain. Although there has been a broadening of interest among historians of adult education, the field remains to an extent in the shadow of the "Great Tradition" of liberal education…

This article is focused on the theoretical basis of the study of the history of education in Serbia in the period from the foundation of the first Teacher College (1871) to the end of the socialist establishment in the country (1989). By theoretical bases, we mean theoretical and methodological assumptions, including ideological patterns, which…

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, historians -- along with archivists and other stakeholders -- began to initiate digital memory banks, inviting members of the public to upload personal stories, pictures, videos, or other material connected to the pandemic and its impact on everyday life. This article describes how platforms from Western and Central…

This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were…

Early American historians provided the public and policy-makers with information about US history that provided both entertainment and policy suggestions. As American historians became more professionalised in the early twentieth century, they concentrated more on their own scholarly concerns and less on policy-relevant writings. In recent…

This study on a "new" history of education is written from the perspective of a participant in the process of discarding Soviet intellectual and physical boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall has, over the past two decades, become a continuous process in post-Soviet societies, when the now liberated historians of education were faced…

Following a short introduction this article is divided into three main sections. The first provides definitions and brief histories of the nature-nurture debate and of neuroscience. The second section shows how in recent decades neuroscientific research has impacted on the debate with particular reference to our understanding of human intelligence…

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the…

This article investigates the role of the recent revolutionary past in post-Napoleonic history education in the Southern Netherlands. From 1794 until 1815 the Southern Netherlands had been incorporated into the French revolutionary state and the Napoleonic Empire, respectively. Often, the experience of the revolution is associated with the birth…