This article explores Alexander von Humboldt's influence on the education of young women in early nineteenth-century America. In the past decade, the English-speaking world has seen a resurgence of interest in Alexander von Humboldt. To date however, scholars have devoted relatively little attention to Humboldt's influence on American education,…

Although common schooling began to take off in the northern United States around the 1830s, it did not gain great momentum in the South until the postbellum period. Spanning this lengthy Common School era, this article explores the role white supremacy played in both the development and the impediment of schooling for the masses in the southern…

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, 1861-1876, formerly enslaved men and women demanded access to education. Aided by northern white missionaries, free blacks and some southern whites, freed men and women throughout the American South built schoolhouses, hired teachers and purchased textbooks. Some of these textbooks were…

The current heritage fascination signals the omnipresence of the Present. Recently it has spawned a distinct type of teaching and learning: "heritage education". In this article we argue that, despite its presentist connotations, heritage education offers interesting opportunities for understanding the foreignness of the past, a…

The objective of this article is to analyse the process of institutionalisation of public elementary schooling associated with the political organisation of the constitutional monarchy and the legislation regarding citizen rights and prerogatives in Brazil, especially in the province of Minas Gerais, during the nineteenth century. During this…

Current explanations for the gap between African-American and white school achievement are inadequate; most cannot explain the high level of black school achievement in the decade after Emancipation. Further, traditional accounts of the origins of educational discrimination against African-Americans are inaccurate. The roots of educational…

This paper articulates the concepts of political culture, schooling and slavery in order to comprehend the process of instituting modern schools in Brazil, during the period immediately after Independence in 1822. With a view to this, it takes as its starting point the strategies and proposals of different groups disputing the direction of the…

This article discusses the effects of imperialism on British (or chiefly English) social life and education in the nineteenth century rather than examining the effects on the colonised as is usually done. It is shown that the nineteenth century was infused with different visual and written images which helped develop attitudes and ideas which…

Access to education formed a substantial boundary in the slave-holding South prior to the American Civil War (1861-1865). After emancipation, African-Americans demanded full access to formal schooling as one symbol of their freedom, seeking thereby to redraw the region's social map. Three groups of teachers in the freed people's schools…

Slavery in the United States denied education to the enslaved. Yet within fifteen years of the beginning of the American Civil War and the freeing of four million American slaves, the freed people and their supporters elaborated a full system of universal education in the South, including over 120 secondary and higher institutions. Historians have…