Histories of Nineteenth-Century Education and the Civil War Era

This review essay analyzes the last generation of writing on nineteenth-century American education, focused on how it speaks to the broader literature on civil-war era debates over citizenship and rights. It begins by surveying new work on the origins of public schooling in the antebellum North, and on the regionally distinct and exclusive educational cultures of the antebellum South and West. It then discusses how this new literature on antebellum education helps contextualize why public schooling was important to Republican and African American plans to remake the South and extend citizenship to freedpeople. Finally, it analyzes recent scholarship on the role of imperialism and white supremacy in stifling inclusive education policy and explains how that scholarship supports the current historiographical trend to see Reconstruction continuing beyond 1877.