Progress, civilization, and American educational historiography, 1690--1960

For forty years the myth has persisted of a monolithic pre-1960 educational historiography narrowly focused on schools and cut off from developments in mainstream historical writing. This dissertation revises such a perception by providing the most comprehensive coverage yet attempted of the earlier period. 1960 does turn out to be the moment of transition from the old to the new, but for a different reason than that usually assumed.;From the earliest colonial writings to the middle of the twentieth century educational historians shared a belief in human progress evidenced by institutional development. Christian millennialism, civic republicanism, and Lockean Liberalism conspired to ensure the overwhelming hegemony of the Whig interpretation of history---the view that the present is the culmination of the past. In the nineteenth century this view was rationalized by the new scientific professionals and christened "civilization." Historians of all sorts, professional, progressive, and educational, subscribed to the doctrine of the evolution of civilization. It was only after the twentieth century's devastating world wars that the idea of universal progress through the expansion of educational institutions was called into question. The most visible manifestation in educational historiography of the postwar rejection of civilization was Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society, published in 1960.;This dissertation, rather than condemning the entire pre-1960 tradition a priori, seeks to understand it as a manifestation of the society and culture whence it sprung. Through a contextualist reading of the tradition's literary productions we understand the project on its own terms. We discover that previous condemnatory accounts have failed to appreciate the extent to which diversity and controversy characterized the tradition. This study uncovers a rich and conflicted pre-1960 educational historiography, broadly conceived and fully embedded in mainstream historiography. Its institutional setting promoted an early penchant toward social science technique, and its subject matter led to a powerful body of early work by African American and women scholars. That Bailyn's critique of this tradition succeeded as it did was due more to its place in Sputnik-era educational politics than any virtues inhering in its historiographical account.