Research in the field of History of Education has experienced a remarkable increase in recent decades. Resulting publications are referenced in generalist databases that do not catalogue academic works according to the specific characteristics of History of Education. Seeking to give response to this bibliographic gap, we are developing a database…

In a book published in 2000, entitled "An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research," Ellen C. Lagemann traced educational research (ER) in the U.S. from its pre-history--the training of common school teachers in summer schools, high schools, normal schools, female institutes, and later colleges and universities.…

This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of…

To explore questions in history and to construct historical narratives, historians work with evidence from the past. This approach to teaching history (inquiry involving the use of evidence) is an accepted part of the research on history teaching and is promoted widely in standards frameworks and practitioner publications as "good history…

The author of this article, James W. Fraser, is Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. He begins this article with an expression of his gratitude to Robert Hampel and the editors of "The History of Education Quarterly" for commissioning the four…

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 article has a dual purpose. The first is to pay tribute to the work of Richard Selleck and Geoffrey Sherington; the second to argue that historians of education can make substantial contributions to current and future educational policy and practice by identifying what Ravitch has called "time-tested truths". The nature and purpose…

Joan Simon (née Peel, 1915-2005) was the life-long partner of Brian Simon who helped launch FORUM in September 1958. Like Brian, she embraced a Communist outlook and engagement in the area of education. Unlike Brian, she practiced the historian's craft outside the male academic hierarchy. Based on newly available personal papers this study…

The author wanted help in learning how to be more effective at supporting his students to learn how to conduct effective research so he interviewed several historians, artists, and educators about the ways in which they carry out their research, and how those researchers who are currently in classrooms help their students to learn and develop…

In this article, I explore the history of a higher education writing community from its establishment in 2005 to the present day. In order to provide a model of community development which may be generalizable, this inherently "partial" and "prejudiced" Autoethnographic account is framed by themes taken from three of the novels of Jane Austen…

In the past decade or so, there has been an increasing interest in employing a combination of archival and life history methods to understand the complexities of schooling. This book explores the history of the Beal Technical School in order to discuss the methods and problems involved in researching the story of an institution. It offers the…

The history of popular education is a long-standing field of research. Its beginnings trace back at least to the mid-twentieth century and it maintains its attractiveness for many researchers, both historians and educators. But, using the same label, quite different lines of research have been developed. They correspond to different ideas about…

The essential nature of oral historical inquiry "naturally" and "relentlessly" brings an oral historian to theory. In this essay, the author argues for the relevance of theory in oral historical research that explores generational transformations in the relational experiences of youth attending desegregated schools in the…

This article looks at the impact of Philippe Aries's classic "L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime", published in 1960. His well-known idea of the emergence of "Le sentiment de l'enfance" caused a lively debate among historians and social scientists resulting in fundamental contributions to our knowledge about the…

Contemporary historians of education associate the term "social efficiency" with a group of US educators who, in the 1910s and 1920s, aimed at creating a technocratic school and a conservative society of social stability and harmony. However, an investigation of the origin of the term indicates that "social efficiency" began…