American College and University: A History

Bibliography

B I B L I O G R A P H Y Historiography of Higher Education in the United States I N T R O D U C T I O N Because the footnotes and index provide a guide to studies on specific subjects and to published documentary material most useful in the present study, I have chosen not to prepare a conventional bibliography. It has seemed to me that the best service to historical scholarship would be to supplement a consideration of standard titles with some general observations on the development of the historiography of higher education in the United States and with some suggestions on needs and opportunities in the field. THE B E G I N N I N G S : H I S T O R Y BY H I S T O R I A N S There is a notion current among historians that educational history is a recent interest among them and that this interest promises to save the subject from professional educators and old grads, to whose care they have heretofore been content to leave it. This view of the matter is approaching the level of myth, even though the first significant volumes on the history of higher education in the United States were the work of professional historians under the guidance of that early master of the research seminar, Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins. Published between 1887 and 1903 by the United States Bureau of Education as Circulars of Information, these volumes attempted a stateby -state survey of the educational history of the American people. Bibliography 498 The early volumes in the series bore the subheading, Contributions to American Educational History. While most of the volumes were state studies, some of the more notable were not, including the first two written by Adams himself, The College of William and Mary (1887), and Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (1888). (In 1887 the Bureau of Education also published another volume by Adams: The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities.) Still useful are Frank W. Blackmar: The History of Federal and State Aid to Higher Education (1890); J. P. Gordy: Rise and Growth of the Normal-School Idea in the United States (1891); and Francis Newton Thorpe, ed.: Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania (1893). Among the authors in the series were John R. Commons, Charles Homer Haskins, George W. Knight, Andrew C. McLaughlin, Bernard C. Steiner, and William Howe Tolman, whose work outside the series, in political and economic history, has found a place in the standard bibliographical work: Oscar Handlin, et al.: Harvard Guide to American History (1954). Of the almost forty volumes in the series, however , only the volume by Gordy is included in the Harvard bibliography . These writings have been forgotten, and so also to a considerable extent has a significant work in intellectual history that appeared in 1900 and which deals at great length with the beginnings of American education, Edward Eggleston: The Transit of Civilization to America in the Seventeenth Century. This pioneer study has recently received the benefit of a new edition (1959) with an introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger and has been warmly praised in an important new guide to research opportunities in early American education: Bernard Bailyn: Education in the Forming of American Society (1960). The suggestion sometimes made that this early work has been forgotten because educational history fell into the hands of the teachers colleges and the old grads overlooks the degree to which such a development was a consequence of default by the professional historians . It seems to me that Herbert Baxter Adams and his co-workers were essentially occupied with an aspect of their larger interest, institutional history, and that they soon ran out of the questions necessary to sustain a developing historical inquiry. Eggleston's little book might have suggested to them unlimited possibilities, but it did not. The historians were engaged in establishing themselves as a profession, and Eggleston was himself not a professional. He was one of the last of a dying race—the self-taught, free-lance historian, a writer who was willing to take a large subject and to ask large questions of it, and one of the first of a breed of historians who would seek an understanding of American society beyond the traditional bounds of political 499 Bibliography activity. In 1900 the future of historical...