Educational curricula, Americanization and the autobiography of a new citizenry, 1880--1920 (Charles Eastman, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Reznikoff)

This dissertation analyzes the material contours of United States citizenship during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through an examination of both educational policy and discourse and literature written by and about the "new" Americans undergoing public school education during this period. It addresses the material and the literary history of citizenship-education and compares the educational histories of American Indians, African Americans and eastern European Jewish immigrants with autobiographies by these new citizens to analyze both the cultural specificity and the common experience of a new U.S. citizenry. The dissertation argues that educators belied their promise to train members of these groups for civic belonging by emphasizing practical and physical labor over liberal arts curricula. As students sifted this paradigm of citizenship through preexisting cultural perspectives, however, what resulted was not simply the reproduction of a socio-economic hierarchy that ensured their subordination, but rather a dialectical process of cultural transformation whereby these citizens transformed U.S. citizenship by both identifying with and resisting it.; Combining archival research on curricula, letters, journals, and questionnaires with analyses of autobiographical writing by Charles Eastman, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Reznikoff, I compare the rhetoric of policy reformers, government agents, and educators who sought to Americanize new citizens with autobiographical accounts of their education by students and new citizens themselves. My analyses of these autobiographical texts emphasize the way these authors occupied self-consciously mediating roles between the dominant educational ideology and their ethnic or racial communities. I argue that even though the U.S. educational apparatus maintained its normative status during this period by attempting to erase the minority subject's agency and individuality, these autobiographers interrupt the conventions required to be intelligible within a meta-discourse of citizenship and subjectivity. In so doing, they expose inconsistencies in the discourses of economic subjectivity and individual progress that their education required them to adopt.