Abstract

This essay summarizes and evaluates the work of Lawrence Cremin, a major historian of American education, over the past two decades, including the Pulitizer Prize winning American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. The third volume in his trilogy, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, appeared last year. This essay reviews the criticism of Cremin’s approach as a context for appraising the achievement of the third volume and finds it lacking in both historical comprehensiveness and in adequacy of execution.

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