Schooldays in New England, 1650 - 1900

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2015. This publication is a collection of papers presented in June of 2015 addressing the general history of education in New England throughout the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. This publication consists of a culmination of many topics regarding education in early New England. The topics range from the upkeep of schoolhouses in colonial Vermont, to the effect of Quakerism on the education of Rhode Island schoolgirls. As well as the direct impact of the first public education institutions for white males in the untested American democracy in colonial Boston and the impact these institutions had on the philosophies and mindsets of young males during revolutionary America.

The following is the title and author of each paper:  Classes, Forms and Divisions in Boston’s Pre-Revolutionary Schools by J.L. Bell, Rendering Rhetoric: Constructing Congregational Girlhood in the Classroom by Jane E. Shattuck, From Samplers to Social Justice: Quaker Female Education in Rhode Island, 1750-1850 by Lynne Anderson, Thompson Island: An Island Republic of Youth by Paul J. Hutchinson, “A symmetrical, harmonious, substantial character”: Schools for Abolitionist Children in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England by Elizabeth C. Stevens, Schooling for Public Life: Hope and Frustration at the New England School for the Blind, 1832-1867 by James W. Trent, Everything about it is important”: Architecture, Furniture, and health in Antebellum District Schoolhouse Reform by Rebecca R. Noel, The Audiences for School Architecture: Projecting Civic Virtue in Boston 1847-1860 by Rachel Remmel, The New England Primer: An African American Artifact? by Caitlin Galante-DeAngelis Hopkins, Intellect and Abolition: Reconstructing the Curriculum at Prudence Crandall’s  Academy for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color by Jennifer Rycenga, “Sent here to improve our immortal minds”: Pen Pictures of School and Schooling in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century New England and New York by Betsy Garrett Widmer.